Interview: Playwright Chloe Hung and ISSEI, HE SAY at NJ Rep

The New Jersey Repertory Company (NJ Rep) will present the world premiere of Chloé Hung's Issei, He Say (Or the Myth of the First) from April 19 to May 20. The winner of of an Edgerton New Play Award, it is directed by Lisa James and stars Stan Egi, Kathleen Kwan, Fenton Li, and Christina Liang.

In the play, Lucy Chu, the central character, is a thirteen-year-old girl whose family has emigrated from Hong Kong to Ontario in 1969. They wind up living next to Mr. Yamamoto, a Japanese-Canadian, who spent WWII in a Canadian internment camp. Haunted by memories of Japanese atrocities during the siege of Nanking, Lucy's father holds his neighbor personally responsible, and forbids Lucy to speak to Mr. Yamamoto. But the rebellious teenager reaches out to her kind neighbor, who can relate to her difficulties and help guide her through the struggles she encounters in her day-to-day life. Prejudices and hatred between the two families reach a boiling point and Lucy is caught in the middle.

Broadwayworld.com had the pleasure of interviewing playwright, Chloé Hung about her career and the upcoming show.

Chloé Hung is a Chinese-Canadian playwright currently residing in Los Angeles. A graduate of NYU Tisch's MFA in dramatic writing program, her first play All Our Yesterdays debuted at the Toronto Fringe Festival to sold out shows and was curated in the prestigious Next Stage Theatre Festival where it received rave reviews. The Globe And Mail named Chloé "a writer to watch." Her next play Issei, He Say (or the Myth of the First) was workshopped at the John F. Kennedy Center with the National New Play Network and is now receiving its world premiere production at New Jersey Repertory Company. For the New Jersey Rep production, Issei, He Say has received an Edgerton Foundation New Play award. Her play Three Women of Swatow was workshopped with Tarragon Theatre's Playwrights Unit and received Canada's RBC Emerging Playwrights Award. She developed Model Minority with Los Angeles-based Moving Arts Theater's MADlab and continues to work on it with the company. Chloé currently writes on season three of the Ava DuVernay created television series Queen Sugar (on the Oprah Winfrey Network OWN).

Tell us a little about your upbringing and how it affected your interest in writing?

I was born and raised in Toronto. I was lucky that I grew up with parents who let me explore the arts. My dad and my stepmom kept me connected to the Chinese community and my mom and stepdad fostered my interests in the arts and in world issues. I was also lucky to have gone to a high school that had a great humanities and arts program. I grew up with a diverse group of friends and a diverse community of people who had immigrated to Canada from all over the world. Everyone's family had a fascinating story and these were stories that I rarely saw told on TV, in film, and in theatre. These are the kinds of stories that I am interested in telling.

Who are some of the writer/playwrights that you enjoy reading?

I love writers that seemlessly merge comedy and drama. Writers like Suzan-Lori Parks, Paula Vogel, and Martin McDonagh are excellent at infusing dark drama with comedy and in doing so they are able to highlight elements of human nature that are honest and sickly fascinating. My favorite recent plays have been An Octoroon by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, King of Yees by Lauren Yee, Straight White Men by Young Jean Lee, John by Annie Baker, and The Wolves by Sarah DeLappe. These writers all play around with form, structure, and subvert the expected. It's exciting to see how theatre is changing and opening up to unique stories told in unique ways. I'm reading Celeste Ng and Jesmyn Ward right now and finding them both to be such incredibly evocative writers.

Tell us a little about your time at Tisch and how it influenced your work.

The graduate dramatic writing program at Tisch taught me endurance and discipline. I've heard some people come out of film or writing programs having worked on one or two scripts and we were working on 2-3 scripts per semester. If you played your cards right, you could graduate with 12 ideas developed (at various stages of writing). I had professors who approached writing with different styles. I had the opportunity to find what worked for me and what didn't.

How does writing for the stage compare to writing for television?

I am surprised how many similarities there are. Both are incredibly collaborative though the difference is that in playwriting the script and the story is mine and in TV I am writing for the showrunner. I love that in both theatre and TV you have many collaborators who contribute their points of view. Television now is moving in the direction of being more character based and playwrights have been a great contributing factor of this shift.

What inspired the play Issei, He Say?

Issei, He Say (or the Myth of the First) is inspired by my grandparents moving to Canada in the late 1960s and with post-World War II tensions still high, they moved in the next door to a Japanese-Canadian man. I've taking many creative liberties with their story but I've infused it with stories that I grew up hearing from my grandparents and from my mom and her siblings. I wanted to tell a family story - your classic living room drama - but instead of a living room, I put it outside in the winter, in Canada, with neighbors from different backgrounds. For a long time, I resisted writing something that was so personal to me and to my family but the more I resisted the more the pieces of the story came to me.

I come from a long line of hardworking women and I find their stories fascinating. Mrs. Chu's storyline is the one that most closely resembles her real-life inspiration - being my grandmother. When her husband had a heart attack in their first year in Canada and stopped working, she was the sole breadwinner for a family of eight. Instead of settling with the cards she had been dealt, she sold the convenience store they ran and found a program for new immigrants that subsidized her going to school to learn a trade. All of this was done with limited English skills. She got a certificate in textiles construction and design and worked her way up from a seamstress to be the head designer at a textiles company in Toronto. I so admire her tenacity, her work ethic, and her resourcefulness. It's something that try to take to my work. While it's not the main storyline of Issei, He Say, it's a thread that I thought was important to highlight: Vivian finding her independence and her voice.

We'd love to know a little about your experience working with NJ Rep.

New Jersey Rep has been incredibly supportive. Joel Stone, the literary manager, came to see a staged reading of Issei, He Say at The Kennedy Center, where I was participating in a National New Play Network workshop of Issei. He approached me after the reading and expressed his interest in the play. SuzAnne and Gabor Barabas have been great supporters and cheerleaders of the play. They brought me out for the first week of rehearsal to work with Lisa James, the director, and our brilliant cast. They all took such good care of me and they take great pride in the play. Hearing them talk about their connection to Issei made my heart full.

What would you like audiences to know about the upcoming show?

There's not much they need to know going into the play. However, there's a lot I hope they take away. I hope audiences will relate to the story - while this is a specific conflict, many families can relate to the immigrant story and the legacy of trauma from war. The scars of war are passed down from generation to generation and this play explores how we can move forward from the pain and still be respectful of the pain. The horrors of a war can never be wiped away but what is the healing process like? Can you connect to someone on a personal level whom you see as being on the opposite side of that war that left you traumatized?

I also hope that the audience enjoys the comedic human moments of the play and are able to use that as a way into these characters who may look different but at their core are just the same.

For the future? Tell us about some of your plans.

I have readings of two plays coming up - Three Women of Swatow on April 28 with Artists at Play in Los Angeles, and Model Minority in mid-May with Moving Arts Company in Los Angeles and in June with Tarragon Theatre Company in Toronto. Three Women of Swatow is about the legacy of abuse told through three generations of Chinese women who have to work together to solve a bloody problem. Model Minority is a comedy/drama about the appropriation of Black culture by young Asian Americans.

I'll be going to New Orleans in early April for the shooting of my first episode on Queen Sugar - the season premieres on the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) on May 29th & 30th. And later in April, I'll be attending the Banff Playwrights Lab in Banff, Canada to workshop Model Minority.

Anything else, absolutely anything you want BWW readers to know.

Issei is the Japanese term for someone who is First Generation. This is a story about first generation immigrants and what that life means. Each of the characters experience being a first generation immigrant in different ways. Mr. Yamamoto has experienced it in a time of war when he was persecuted. Lucy takes on adolescence as a first generation immigrant. Mr. Chu struggles with what being a first generation immigrant does to his masculinity - going from a society where he was on top to one where he is regarded as an Other. Mrs. Chu struggles with the new life but discovers that being a first generation immigrant could possibly have more to offer than her old life.

For more information about Chloe Hung, visit her website at www.chloehung.com and follow her on twitter: @thisthatchloe.

New Jersey Repertory Company is located at 179 Broadway in Long Branch. Previews of Issei, He Say (Or the Myth of the First) begin April 19 and opening night with reception is Saturday, April 21 at 8:00 pm. Regular performances are Thursdays, Fridays at 8:00 pm; Saturdays at 3:00 pm and 8:00 pm; Sundays at 2:00 pm. For more information visit http://www.njrep.org/ or call 732.229.3166.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Chloe Hung