University of Massachusetts Amherst. All rights reserved.
2003 University of Massachusetts Amherst. All rights reserved.
Coconut Masquerade postcard
Born in Hawaii and raised in Los Angeles, Roberta Uno intended to study medicine when she enrolled at Hampshire in the mid-1970s, but grew increasingly interested in the theater. After graduation in 1977, she took a year off to explore playwriting before applying to medical school; however, that year turned into a career.
Hired by the Office of Student Activities, Uno developed the idea of establishing a truly multicultural theatrical company, which launched in 1979 AS The Third World Theater Series, developed into the New World Theater, a theater in residence dedicated to the production of works by playwrights of color. Serving for 23 years as the Theater's artistic director and as professor of theatre at the University, Uno directed and helped produce dozens of plays by both new and established playwrights, many from outside the mainstream of university-affiliated theatrical companies. During her time at UMass, she also earned an MFA in 1994 for Directing and a thesis on Diana Saenz, "A dream of canaries: the staging of a new work."
She is a member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers. Since leaving UMass, Uno is the Senior Program Officer for Arts and Culture at the Ford Foundation in New York City. Among other works, she is author of
Established by Roberta Uno in 1993, the Asian American Women Playwrights Scripts Collection contains manuscripts of plays, but also production histories, reviews, and articles, along with biographies and audio and videotaped interviews with playwrights. Among the individuals represented are Brenda Wong Aoki, Jeannie Barroga, Marina Feleo Gonzales, Jessica Hagedorn, Velina Hasu Houston, Genny Lim, le thi diem thuy, Ling-Ai Li, Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl, Nobuko Miyamoto, Bina Sharif, and Diana Son.
The collection is open for resesarch.
Please use the following format when citing materials from this collection:
Roberta Uno Asian American Women Playwrights Scripts Collection (MS 345). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.
Accretions expected.
Acquired from Roberta Uno and the New World Theatre, University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Processed by SCUA staff.
The University Archives houses the records of the New World Theater (RG-25 T3.7).
Summary: A play based on a composite of facts experienced by Japanese Americans during World War II.
Summary: In an imaginary country in Central America an unusual friendship develops between the dictator and the American ambassador.
Summary: The Toda family breaks apart as they are moved from assembly center to concentration camp to segregation center.
Summary: The chairman of the department is on his deathbed and the vultures are circling above.
Summary: A young visitor from the States disrupts the sabbatical of a middle aged professor and his wife in London.
Summary: Kenzo, a Japanese American professor coming up for tenure at a small mid-western college, alarms his wife Sheila and his sister Vivian by suddenly joining the anti-Vietnam war movement and falling in love with a young student radical.
Summary: The women in the English department of a small college, in a series of shady alliances and betrayals, deny tenure to one of their colleagues.
Summary: In a monologue the "Cassandra of Watergate" tells the story of her meteoric rise and fall and her abiding love for her husband.
Summary: Harriet suffers from dementia and watches as her daughter and grandson sell her home and shut down her life.
Summary: Mishima, obsessed by death, tries to fashion his life into a work of art.
Summary: Picasso leaves middle-aged Cleo for her young niece Danielle.
Summary: In Lisbon a birdman rescues the last human child as an earthquake puts an end to the civilized world.
Obake! is a program of Japanese Ghost Stories, performed on a bare stage with minimal lighting. Four performance pieces: "Black Hair", "Dancing in California", "Havoc in Heaven", and "The Bell of Dojoji" explore the pathos, humor and courage of women defying their destiny in a hostile world.
Contains an article detailing Aoki's training in Japan, an article on her, a videotaped interview and two versions of a brochure on Aoki and her works which includes a bio and project description of SUN CYCLES. Also contains a playbill and reviews from Oct-Nov 1992 dual production of The Queen's Garden and Obake! and reviews of her one-woman show "Supernatural Stories from the Orient."
Summary: Urban storytelling and street mythology-based on Aoki's childhood, growing up "mixed up as chop suey" with street gangs in Long Beach, California, and her fifteen years of experiences as a community organizer and teacher in Watts, East L.A., Hunter's Point, the Mission, and Chinatown. A look into the lives of "other" Americans and a fearless portrayal of Aoki's roots among L.A.'s urban tribes. A one woman show.
Includes a video of the performance, along with articles and correspondence. Summary: This is the true story of the first mixed marriage in California, the public outrage over this union and its subsequent impact on the descendants today. It is a story of forbidden love between a Samurai and the Archdeacon's daughter that made headlines across the country in 1909.
Summary: A one-woman show depicting a Filipino mother extolling the virtues of adobo chicken for breakfast.
Summary: A jazz poem/play depicting the life of Jack Kerouac, novelist of the Beat generation, as narrated by the ghost of jazz musician Charlie Parker.
Includes two versions of the script. Summary: A comedy of errors results when a reclusive painter receives an unexpected visit from a former fellow art student with a penchant for faux pas and prone to accidents.
Summary: Dramatizes the picture-bride wedding of a pregnant Filipino girl and a seventy-year-old manong in L.A.
Includes articles, reviews and photographs of productions. Summary: A comic drama of a Filipino musician in an Hawaiian band raising his marriageable daughters in the mid-west with his matriarchal wife.
Includes a copy of the play and a playbill for the Northside Theatre's March 1988 production. Summary: A project stemming from an acting workshop for all ages in which participants' various stories depicted a day in the life of working families with school age children, all of whom have their own daily trials and tribulations.
Summary: An off-beat Frank Capra-style comedy in which a poor writer wins the affections of a woman in a dead end affair with a rich editor.
Summary: A spoof on a newswriter scouring the woodsy northern California forests for the elusive Bigfoot when he encounters a woman in a silver suit.
Amonologue.
Two versions along with several reviews. Summary: A couple tries to retain the good memory of their recalcitrant son for a reporter who, in flashbacks, recalls the boy in her high school with a similar cultural struggle.
Summary: The trials and tribulations of a recently immigrated Filipino family joining their father in San Francisco parallels that of an Americanized Filipino family when the sons of both begin their odysseys to find their roots and their places in society.
Winner of Bay Area Playwrights Festival 1993 Ten-Minute Play Contest.
Summary: An immigrant reveals the opportunistic resourcefulness that all foreigners rely on or learn in America by pursuing a green-card marriage with a first-generation Asian woman.
Contains the script and a complete synopsis of the play. Summary: One-act dealing with art patroness Mabel Dodge, D.H. Lawrence, and other artists. Set in l922 in an artist's colony in Taos, New Mexico.
Summary: A woman fantasizes about her Muse and/or lover while surrounded by the many characters in and out of her life, all portrayed by friends who bear remarkable resemblances to each other.
Summary: A one-man one-act play depicting the visit of a man beset by averageness to his mute (unseen) quadraplegic friend who could have been more. Events reveal that their childhood dreams had been their commonality until the first man's prejudice overcame friendship.
Summary: Friends once sharing a commune in California reunite for the Stones concert and display their joy and frustrations over stasis, sellout, support and lack of it, and the repercussions of one couple's open relationship.
Summary: An older woman confronts the sister of a younger man who had been a love-interest, although unrequited, of hers. One has withheld all love; the other risks pride for the chance of love.
Summary: Spoof on the nuclear family of the fifties where the housewife gains self-confidence when confronting a heavy-breather phone caller, her husband conquers fear of fire, and their daughter dispels the mother's maniacal fear of tabloid scare tactics.
Summary: The test-run of homing pigeons coincides with the return of a wayward daughter to her parents, as observed by the son who never left and resented his responsibility.
Summary: A neighbor girl and her younger sister entreat the neighbor lady to re-tell her son's tale of wartime love, but get the truth instead.
Summary: A Filipino-American writing teacher compares the similar searches of both her student and that of a young Aborigine during her rescue from the Australian bush. Comparison also occurs between her nineties-enlightened boyfriend and the down-to-earth Aussie conducting the rescue.
Multiple versions. Summary: During the turbulent 1970s, a Filipino family tries to make ends meet in various quirky ways, disregarding that world events affect their own lives.
Summary: An immigrant reveals the opportunistic resourcefulness that all foreigners rely on or learn in America by pursuing a green-card marriage with a first-generation Asian woman. misfits" during the racial riots of 1968 when one classmate is forever affected by an old black man's lonely vigil and when she herself had initially lost her faith.
Contains play, drafts, many reviews, flyers, playbills and photo from Mark Taper Forum's 1992 production. Summary: Haunted by the parables of her family's past, a Filipino-American woman struggles to define her personal and professional future amidst the lingering prejudices of modern America.
Summary: Dramatizes an aggravated assault by a homeless person reacting to the prejudices of society in the forms of an aged benefactor, a deli owner and two cops.
Summary: Set in war-torn Philippine Islands where a family together with the townspeople flee from the Japanese to the mountains, regaling and astounding the teen girl coming of age with various folklore and superstitions.
Summary: Two fiesty writers run the gamut of their friendship, which echoes the baseball career of a certain San Francisco team.
Two versions. Summary: Details a woman's initial encounter with varying influences during high school: a liberal white teacher and a rigid African American teacher with a handicap.
Includes three versions, a 10 p. interview with Barroga, preview and review of productions of Walls. Summary: Dramatization of the controversy behind the Vietnam Memorial interspersed with scenes of those affected by it.
Summary: Historical drama set in mid-Wisconsin in the 1850s; an odd Indian woman in Victorian dress descends on the Indian agent and his wife and with her multi-lingual skills circumvents a skirmish with local Indians while befuddling the agent and charming the Indian maid in their house.
Summary: In July of 1876 the wife of the unseen General George Armstrong Custer maintains that her husband is a national hero and will be president as she manipulates niece, maid, officers and the press with her cunning.
Summary: This comedy explores the possibility that Horatio met the Players for Hamlet, because Hamlet felt overwrought from all that was rotten in Denmark. Written in verse, with a holiday song to be danced and sung in Elizabethan style, or not.
Revised copy and first draft. Summary: A patient dying of cancer tries to seduce his nurse on his birthday.
Includes advertisement for March 10,1998 reading of the piece at The Augusta Savage Gallery, UMass Amherst.
Summary: This short one-act children's play tells the folk tale of the Balinese Monkey God Hanuman in three different episodes, and reveals the change of relationship between man and beast over the centuries. The play consists of three characters: the Tourist who learns the tale, the Tour Guide who tells the tale and changes at each encounter, and the Monkey who enacts the tale.
Summary:Inspired by the true incident of a Reuters reporter who was arrested in Peking in retaliation for the arrest of Communist party members in Hong Kong during the Cultural Revolution. He got ill and met a woman doctor, and it began a story about what might happen if the two actually fell in love, the effect it has on her family, and on him.
Summary: Misha, a political prisoner wrestles with his conscience Masha, in attempt to remember the crucial moment that occurred before he was accused of assasinating a political leader. His mental battle and his conscious battle occur on the stage at the same time.
Part of Ailing Acts.
Earlier called the Junk Bay Tale several drafts, along with correspondence with script advisors and reviewers. Summary : A young English man, Johnny Kent, brings his father's ashes back to Hong Kong to find out about the truth about his family, from a Chinese family that helped raise him. His dead parents, now ghosts, watch his journey from Limbo, and try to interfere with his discoveries in the living world.
First draft.
Includes programs from two staged readings. Summary: The story of a young British man who returns to his birthplace of Hong Kong to discover an unknown family tie upon his father's death. The setting is a sanatorium cell where an old Chinese man awaits release from confinement.
Summary: A lonely housewife seeks romance in the Virtual Running Room of her local gym.
Summary: A tale of lost love and continuance. A ten-minute play telling the story of how one woman's life changes when two brothers enter her world.
Summary: Tells the story of a young South American man's journey through the United States and into the heart of Chinatown. There he falls in with, and into the arms of, a mother and her daughter and learns the meaning of home. An American love triangle.
Summary: This play is a coming-of-age tale of a Chinese girl growing up in the middle of the desert, surrounded by her brother, an absent father, and a mother who never wants her daughter to feel the pain of womanhood.
Summary: Incorporates hula and theater to break down stereotypes of Hawaiian Natives and challenge myths that the tourism industry in Hawaii has created. The structure consists of vignettes, short scenes, poetic interludes, and moments of visual imagery.
One woman show; includes a videotape of the performance. Summary: A piece that employs dance, poetry, story, music, and the hula to explore the complexities of modern Hawaii.
Summary: A play which employs music, fantasy, and epic storytelling to explore issues of multiculturalism.
Multiple versions, along with playbill and article on playwright with focus on this play.
Three versions.
Includes review in High Performance, 1992.Published in Times Edition; Singapore.
Summary: Believed to be the first use of authentic pidgin dialogue in a play by an Asian American writer, For You A Lei depicts the struggle of a Chinese widow as she copes with bringing up a family of four in a Chinatown setting in Hawaii. Though poor, the children in the family show sibling and parental loyalties and derive happiness from simple pleasures such as lei making with a Hawaiian playmate.
Two versions. Summary: A young Chinese woman tries to find her own solution when faced with the problem of making a choice between a disapproved interracial marriage or a loveless arranged union. The play is set more than half a century ago in the 1930s when interracial marriages were not readily accepted.
Semifinalist in Nantucket Short Play Competition. Includes two photographs, playbill, and poster from May 2000 production directed by Robert Dahoy at Carlsbad Playhouse. Summary: A continuation of the Grimm fairy tale, "The Fisherman and His Wife." A timid Fisherman is granted his ambitious wife's wish to be God.
Summary: History of Filipino Americans in the United States, presented through drama, music, and dance.
Summary: Retelling of two Grimm fairy tales.
Earlier draft of the "The Mirror".
Summary: The racist Headmaster of an inner city elementary school dominates the spirits and minds of his staff and students until they learn how to fight back.
Summary: A young Filipino American woman struggles to keep her family together as she confronts her own failure.
Summary: Two halves of a Filipino American girl struggle to reconcile their identity.
Summary: On an isolated island in the Philippines, a woman is tried for infidelity.
Finalist in fifth annual Women at the Door Staged Reading Series, Famous Door Theatre. Summary: An elderly rich woman in orange County tries to order an eternal slave from Egypt from her afterlife. Instead, she is taken on a freedom ride through history.
Summary: History of Filipino Americans in the United States, presented through drama, music, and dance. "Windows," published in Concepts (1987). Summary: Basis for "Holes" and "The Mirror." A traditional Filipino American sister attempts to stop her unconventional younger sister from running away with a white sailor.
Includes two reviews.
Includes a review.
Summary: A one woman, 40 minute, dance theater work where Maura's once white-identified self concept receives a shattering blow in the form of a family secret. In her search for explanations, Maura simultaneously exposes the shame fear she held for her own Vietnamese heritage as a young girl and the developing pride that grew as she turned into a young woman. The resulting piece is a stimulating multi-media journey into an understanding of "self" in a society heavily reliant on categories.
Consists just of an advertisement of the show commissioned by Dance Theater Workshop.
Summary: An exhilirating multi-media work created in collaboration with writer Ava Chin. It brings together many voices in an exploration of the Asian American experience fron a bi-racial perspective. The work overflows with movement both striking in its athleticism and alluring in its aggressive sensuality.
Grouped by playwright with "Sparrow" as a joint production entitled "Two Women/Two Countries." Summary: A Caucasian social worker and an Asian American computer systems analyst in a New York foster-care agency have a violent encounter with an African American, once a child in care, who has come to claim his case records ten years after serving time.
Summary: A Filipino political emigre, searching for an apartment in New York City on the eve of the 1986 Philippine Revolution, answers an advertisement for a sublet on the Lower Eastside and finds herself entangled in people's lives as confrontations erupt in an art gallery opening.
Grouped by playwright with "Burning Out" as a joint production entitled "Two Women/Two Countries." Summary: A Filipina, newly arrived in the Philippines after an absence of ten years in the U.S., pleads for her brother's release with a childhood friend she'd left behind who, since then, has become the head of the left-wing assassination squad that's taken him hostage.
Summary: A Filipino revolutionary comes to the U.S. on a political mission and copes with American affluence.
Short play for children.
Includes reviews and programs. Summary: a Filipino nanny comes to the United States to take care of a thoroughly assimilated and Americanized Filipino boy and becomes a catalyst for his mother's painful confrontation with a Philippine past she'd much rather forget and the American present to which she's escaped.
Play card advertisements and copy of script. Summary: Flash! Whirlwind family images of a haunted past descend upon Maya's brain like a testament to attention deficit disorder. Driven by profound longing, and the encouragement of Ima, a wild ghostly elder, Maya returns to the people she most wanted to understand.
Includes video, advertisements, and playbill.
Biograpical sketch on file along with copy of published play. Summary: An intergenerational drama that takes place in both the past and the present, exploring the complexities of Maori identity.
Summary: When Daphne Wakata encounters her old classmate, Grace, working in a fancy hotel, she assumes that she is just another loser. But when Grace ties Daphne up in the isolated penthouse suite and forces her to deal with Daphne's past influence on Grace's life, the roles of servant and served are revealed to be not quite what they seemed.
Includes a playbill.
Pilot teleplay for a future series.
Dramatic adaptation, story by Fatima Lim-Wilson.
Summary: A dramatic reading recreating Rizal's days in Dapitan.
Solo-performance piece.
Summary: The story of a young girl's reaction to her older sister's murder. She moves in a fluid, if not linear, world of death: from a sudden inability to verbally articulate her confusing emotions, to a succinct, shattering realization of what has happened.
Summary: In this work-in-progress several themes are explored including cultural displacement and sexual and ethnic identity.
Includes a publicity brochure.
Includes a publicity brochure.
Includes a publicity brochure.
Multiple drafts. Summary: A young woman confronts her co-dependence as the ghostly effects of her father's alcoholism haunt her own personal life.
Three versions. Summary: An African-American brings his Japanese immigrant bride to meet his family in New York, only to discover that the American dream and its fabled melting pot is more myth than reality.
Includes reviews and program note. Summary: A Japanese patriarch struggles to come to terms with his country's defeat in World War II and the consequences that it brings to bear upon his family, including his daughter falling in love with an African American soldier.
Formerly "The Melting Plot". Summary: Five Amerasian women explore the history of their creation and identities through one of the group's search to find her American father. Commissioned by Manhattan Theatre Club, New York.
Includes a review of this play. Summary: Under threat of having to care for his retired and recalcitrant parents on his own, an unmarried Japanese American businessman is forced to enter a charm school in order to learn how to find a wife in the midst of women's liberation.
Summary: Beseiged by the raucous mistress of her philandering husband, a native Japanese woman tries to commit parent-child suicide by walking into the ocean with her two small children. The play examines domestic dysfunction and the idea of cultural defense and how it figures in the judging of the woman's crime.
Includescopy of dissertation and two plays for USC School of Theatre: Calling Aphrodite (play) and Kokoro (screenplay).
Includes a review of this play. Summary: This play examines the journey of a spiritually bereft woman and her husband adrift in a materialistic world. The couple's malaise is torn wide open by the wife's attempt to solve their problems by adopting a baby through independent means.
Multiple drafts. Summary: A lyrical look at the life of Hawaiian princess Ka'iulani who was half Hawaiian and half Scottish.
Summary: On the event of the death of their Blackfoot Indian mother, five estranged African-Indian American sisters come together and are forced to peel back the layers of their lives to deal with the incest that destroyed their family.
Two versions, along with many reviews, photos, and a playbill from the production of the play by the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble. Summary: Four Japanese women and the spirit of a fifth struggle to come to terms with their lives as immigrants in a small Kansas town and with the histories that brought them there in the wake of the tragic suicide of a member of their expatriate community.
Summary: After their mother's death, three Japanese American sisters fight over her legacy and confront the extramarital affair that produced one of them, a Eurasian loner who was their mother's favorite child.
Summary: A fresh-off-the-jet Japanese woman comes to L.A. after having skipped out on her wedding. Determined to live successfully in America, she becomes politicized by a rash of Asian hate crimes happening in the community while she also tries to figure out the difference between love and friendship in her personal life.
Includes only an advertisement of the show.
Includes a video, publicity, and articles.
Contains only a review. Summary: A Japanese boy's attempt to win his girl's hand without becoming a samurai first forces him to play with all the courtiers to guarantee his triumph.
Summary: In this adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, mythical gods and goddess are reborn as homeless kids who relive mythical tragedies on the street.
Four versions. Summary: Looks at the tensions within a family and a community in the tumultuous days preceding World War II; a three-act drama.
Summary: Momma, Mommie is a full length musical that explores the clash of cultures as a young Asian-Indian woman finds love with an American Westerner. Shirin Kalkunte, living in the United States with her uncle, falls in love with a young American mid-westerner, John Willis, just graduated from college. Together they face opposition from John's parents who see the romance as a clash of culture and not what they had hoped for their son. With the support of John's newly widowed grandmother, the couple manage to gently overcome the odds and bring the families together.
Summary: An atrocity of war explodes in an emotional story of the Korean "comfort women".
Play is based on newspapers, published documents, and the dramatic poem"The Princess" by Robert Nelson.
Summary: a children's play about Samoan children adjusting to life in Honolulu.
Summary: A one hour, one woman show about Vietnam, this piece explores questions of memory, personal and political violence and dislocation. The central narrative parallels and contrasts one Vietnamese family's life in Vietnam with their life in Southern California after the war. The play stages memories of Vietnam, which are reflections not only on the devastation of war but also on the tender moments people share every day in spite of and in the midst of war.
Summary: This piece charts the beginnings and continuation of a psychological state of floating, focusing on the refugee experience of being on water.
Summary: A one-act play about survival and sacrifice in a confined space.
Summary: A two-act drama of inter-related one-act plays about the last rural Chinatown in America.
Summary: The play explores the conflicts between three middle-aged (40s to 50s) Chinese-American sisters who as children in the 1960s, performed together in a Las Vegas nightclub act, but who dealt with the passing of that childhood spotlight in very different ways.
Summary: A two-act play on inter-racial marriage.
Summary: A short one act play about renewal.
Summary: a two-act play with music, about herbalism in the early 1900s.
Summary: A one-act play about a Chinese-American cowboy whose descendants rent a bus to Las Vegas.
Summary: A two-act play about a Chinese man caught between Chinese, Yurok, and American cultures in the 1870s.
Includes playbills and photos from productions.
Two versions. Summary: Depicts the revolt of children and the law of family.
Summary: the conflict of Rose Moy between consenting to the match-making arrangements for her to an accepted son of a Mandarin, her own desire to pursue a career, and her final submission as a filial daughter to her father's wishes.
Summary: A Lama priest and his coterie of young priests chanting hymns to heaven to the young man seeking refuge from the evils (the blue serpent) and the goodness (the white serpent) within himself.
Incldues a review and flyer. Summary: Laid out like a Greek tragedy, the story follows a young Chinese laborer who tries to redeem his family's name in the Hawaiian sugarcane plantations of the 1880s only to find himself fatefully enslaved in the very obsession which killed his father.
Summary: A poetic drama that explores the psychological and spiritual journey of a Chinese woman who lived in the 1600s to become a great healer and saint in Mexico.
Published in
Published in
Includes a review. Summary: a group of five Asian American queer women (4 lesbians and 1 bisexual) sit around after dinner. Each character represents a type (bisexual, mixed-heritage, butch, femme, intellectual), yet each character is shown to be more than just a type. The five women discuss topics pertinent to them. Controversial subjects such as racism, bisexuality and intimacy are treated with respectful humor, then quickly dropped as the next conversation topic rolls around. The play ends as the five women go their separate ways, two as a couple, two as friends, and one to a date.
Includes a review and playbill. Summary: A three-part oral history piece with music presenting the history of Japanese Americans.
Includes a program cover and review. Summary: Explorations through oral history, story, poetry, song and movement of Asian American female identity.
Contains only an article on a production of this piece. Summary: A play, with music, on early Native American, Asian, Black, Chicana, and white women of Washington state.
Contains only a brief review.
Includes a playbill and photograph. Summary: A non-realistic, realistic, serio-comic romance between an African-American man and a Japanese American woman. Fearful of intimacy and the being of a person who faces them, Rakim and Helen come to the core of their own existence by conquering their fears in this feel-good romance.
Contains only a brochure.
Incldues a brochure.
Includes a videotape of performance. Summary: Weaving together a poetic fusion of song, monologue, video imagery, dance and sound, this autobiographical piece deals with Noboko Miyamoto's experiences as an activist and singer of the Asian American movement, a child of World War II internment camps, a performer on Broadway and in films, and as a single mother. Noboko uses her life story as a microcosm for the larger struggle of Asian Americans seeking a voice in society and creating a greater understanding between cultures.
Contains only reviews of this piece.
Includes publicity materials. Summary: Set in a forest outside of Kyoto, a horrible crime takes place and three people are brought together by fate. A Japanese tale about the relativism and unknowability of truth. A Judge meets a mysterious woman at the gates of Rashomon and recounts the one trial that stumped his reasoning. Three different accounts of the murder were presented at trial and the judge eventually settles on his own perceptions of character to execute justice. The woman challenges his verdict and presents her own rendition of what happened.
Contains only publicity material. Summary: Partitions explores a story of remembrance of the division of families and hearts caused by the partition of India in 1947. Set during the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, immediately after Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's assassination in Delhi, a young Sikh journalist, Bishen Singh, sets off on a search for his own roots and attempts to understand the past in order to restore his hope in the future.
Includes a review with comments by Ms. Noda. Summary: A tragi-comedy in two acts, this play focuses on the lives of three women with a common goal. As they paint a room in a San Francisco Victorian, their separate lives unfold romantically, materially and spiritually.
Summary: Through a health agency the American government offers to provide plastic surgery to Namilo, but the Japanese spurn charity. Why offer aid to 50 when 50,000 need plastic surgery? Should she accept the offer?
Summary: Sampachi (called Sam Patch by Americans) returns back to Japan on one of Commodore Perry's ships, but would be put to death by Shogun if caught. He sneaks into his family home on Bon night, while all are dancing and paying respect to family ancestors.
Summary: A soldier who returns home to Hiroshima, is spat on because he returns home alive. He sees his disfigured wife for the first time. He insists he will take her to his new home, but when he shudders at the sight of the disfigured half of her face, she refuses to go and escapes into the hills. To be read as poetry.
Summary: This performance piece uses the music, surrealistic text, and the Japanese dance form, Butoh, to illustrate the experiences of the main character, who struggles with the confines and barriers of language.
Copy of script and a video of the performance. Summary: This piece explores what happens when an Asian lesbian and practicing Buddhist finds desire, identity, and commitments at odds. Finely drawn character monologues include an exiled Zen master, a 1970s radical lesbian separatist, a bewildered Chinese-American mother, and a zestful Italian cook.
Includes press releases with quotes from reviewers, reviews, technical requirements and observed audiences to be targeted by publicity. Summary: Taxi Karma: The home of the Dalai Lama is vividly evoked in a madcap taxi ride through Dharamsale, India, introducing us to Tibetan aristocrats, Hindi movie stars, child beggars and Buddhist monks. The Dissident: searching for ancestral wisdom in China, Sam is drawn to the Himalayan plateaus where she meets a Buddhist nun with haunting accounts of post-Tiananmen Tibet.
Summary: a play about the disappearing values in Japanese American life. Family conflicts arise when a man assumes he understands his Japanese heritage and is confronted with a crisis that makes him choose between his Western values and those he believes he has found in his study of Japanese culture. He must choose between life and death for his father and determine how to care for his surviving mother.
Summary: When World War I ended many women in Hawaii quit their wartime jobs to settle down and raise kids. Effie Wong retired and found herself with a baby girl in a traditional Chinese family with a post-war, post-partum depression. On Mother's Day she faces an ailing mother-in-law, remembers her mother's painful death, and confronts her failure to bring a son into her husband's family.
Published in
Contains only reviews.
First draft.
Summary: A one-act about two New Yorkers completely lost in their own narrow, isolated world.
Contains only reviews and a photograph from the production. "Blow Job" was taken from another play, "Dreamland," and included in "Fire." Includes reviews, radio broadcast, press release and a poster.
Includes a playbill. Summary: An extremely unhappily married older couple who stayed together for years without ever understanding each other. The man gives in to the woman's furious complaints.
Includes a brief review.
First and final drafts in archive along with production photo and flyer. Summary: This play is experienced in the mind of an Arab woman living in America during the Persian Gulf war of 1991. She is watching the non-stop carpet bombing of her native city, Basra.
Early and final draft, along with article on play. Summary: This play is about the everlasting complication and difficulty of relationships and fantasy of something, no matter how vague as being better somewhere else.
Two versions, along with production notes, a review and a playbill.
Two versions, along with production notes, a review and a playbill.
Early and final drafts, along with many reviews a playbill, a press release. Summary: A play which begins as a love story between an Indian woman and a British gentleman and turns into a horrific tale of everlasting colonization of Indian soil and soul by the British Empire.
Contains only reviews and a photograph from the production.
Copy ,video, and publicity. Summary: Three characters are keeping up, eating away, surgically altering, and making appearances through different decades of 20th century America. From the lyrical to the personal, these Asian women experience what happens when there's too much or just not enough.
Summary: Janie tries to find sure footing on the line separating her life as a child and adult after her mother is hit with a stroke. She returns to the small town where she bolted from to care for her much-changed mom. At the same time, Janie's childhood friend Ellen tries to decide if she should cut in or stay out of Janie's precarious dance.
Summary: Four Asian American women respond to the sexual stereotyping of them as geishas, exotic virgins, china dolls and suicidal Miss Saigons. They reveal their experiences as: a preppie whose mother forbade her from eating kimchee; a woman who feels ugly because she doesn't look like the girl on the macadamia nut bottle; a flirtatious lesbian who ends up dateless because no one suspects she's queer, and a Korean American woman who doesn't understand it when her boyfriend tells her that he loves her in Korean.
Includes playbill from Soho Rep production. Summary: A modern reworking of the Procne and Philomela myth in which two sisters are forced apart then reunited through the ferocity of their will and ingenuity. Procne is brokered into marriage with the warrior king Tereus who later rapes Philomela and hides her away. Philomela sends a robe to Procne in which she weaves the story of what happened to her. Procne rescues Philomela as Tereus gives them chase. As he and his army close in, the sisters are transformed into birds and escape through flight.
Summary: Two women become friends, fall in love in New York City, and then become victims of a gay-bashing incident. Received the 1999 Media Award from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation for Outstanding New York Theatre Production on Broadway or Off-Broadway, and has been nominated for an Outer Critics Circle award for outstanding Off-Broadway production and a Drama League Award for distinguished production of a play.
Summary: Four Asian American women compare the stories told and not told to them about their cultural past over an existential game of mah-jongg (no one knows how to play).
Includes award program. Summary: A migrant family from the Philippines in trying to adapt to the American way of life, violate their true nature. The compromises they make and the conflictual tensions they face compel them to become "queer." Second prize winner in the 1996-1997 Con Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature for full-length play.
Includes production brochure. Summary: 45 minute multimedia theatre piece following a Japanese American family of four from World War II up to 1992 fifty years later.
Summary: Two women in their twenties, one a Chinese immigrant named Anita, and one a W.A.S.P. named Victoria befriend each other one lonely evening in a bus-stop in the San Joaquin Valley in the mid 1960s.
Includes videotape, brochure and reviews. Summary: An eighty minute one-woman tragicomic exploration of the myths and taboos assigned to mixed "bloodedness" and a coming to terms with dual Japanese Anglo Saxon American racial and cultural identity.
Includes letters, reviews and publicity information on the play. Summary: A one-act play that looks at the Japanese American internment through the perspectives of four different women.
News-style monologue.
Summary: a psychological tragicomedy highlighting the bureaucratic life of a young Japanese American woman in the early 1980s. Two acts.
Three versions, along with cast lists and playbills for three staged readings in 1987, 1988, 1993, and one production in 1994 of this play; a lengthy synopsis; and a videotape. Summary: A Japanese American teenager inherits a box of origami cranes from a grandmother she has never known. Her determination to discover the meaning of the gift leads her to confront her family's tumultuous, hidden past.
Monologue from "Pieces of a Whole."
Work-in progress.
Includes a playbill and publicity materials. Summary: Char and Blur, two musician drifters driving from the East Coast to the West Coast, witness the merging of the coasts after the United States implodes on its own bullshit, leaving just a slit of land where there was once a superpower. During the course of the play they encounter foreigners, fascists and the sounds of the oceans. This play was used to test a thesis: Can a story be told out of sequence, and if so, is it the same story? The thesis production was done in three shows: The Naive Show, where the text is performed in the order it was written; The Decadent Show, with audience/ user interference in selection of the sequence of scenes complete with a mouse emcee; and the Sophisticated Show which starts out with user participation until the system crashes (all in the dark) to start again from the top of the show and play out as intended (decadence back into naivete).
Summary: Trixi Chan is trying to hook a reluctant Jay Sepastapol into commitment. As they drive along Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park, her car breaks down in front of Crown Goose, a local stripping bar. There they meet zany characters such as Deavere Nicole, a stripper who is trying to fuse the two personas of woman (neutered intelligence, or bimbo slut); Harry, an older gay man who navigates the night as a cop; Bos, a quiet sad man waiting for Patty the Firegirl to drive to Mexico; Bos' Sexual Conscience who acts out his inner desires. Trixi is stripped of her facades after her night at Crown Goose. This is a girl-loses-car, girl-loses-boy, girl-gets-car-fixed, girl-drives-away with-another-boy story reflecting the stature that car/machine has in the Los Angeles personality.
Two versions, script includes notes for set. Summary: This is an expressionistic play that takes place in a rather warped Dim Sum restaurant in Los Angeles Chinatown. Bunny Ling, one of the "cart girls" has been smuggled into the country and enslaved. She is taken by Charlie, a vile, self-loathing waiter, who has contempt for white people and a penchant for porn. The restaurant's Cook works in a dark, cavish basement, mixing his secret ingredients for delectable dumplings, which at one point come alive. Joyce, a homeless woman, is addicted to the Cook's dumplings and collects coins outside the restaurant for her dumpling fix. Daisy Lee, a former porn star, is being cut up by Dr. Harvey, a man who has promised a cure for her. From the netherworld, Dumpling Ghost, Muse and Dr. God descend upon the restaurant and realize their own limitations in a foreign world. This is a tale about eating and being eaten.
Summary: Gal visits Guy at 4 a.m. in full seductress regalia as she tries to win his attention by becoming various women she envisions him desiring. Seemingly his mistress, it turns out that she is actually his wife. Gal is unable to mesh the dual definitions of what a woman is supposed to be.
Summary: The sequal to Ikebana, continuing to use one ikebana flower arrangement as the impetus for each scene. Also a part of the construction dynamics are icons of all sizes and shapes, including Tina Turner, Barry Manlow, woman, Shakespeare, Prince, bride and groom, Baudrillard, father, Gong Li, Jane Morgan, Alberto Fujimore and the tiny computer figurines.
Includes a playbill, artist's notes on the play, and publicity materials. Summary: Ikebana is the story of a three-generation Chinese-American family and their secrets. Grandma Rose's favorite daughter, Ester, is dying of cancer but the secret is kept from Rose by her family in order to protect her from heartbreak.Her less-favored daughter, Lily, has found religion through the voice of Mahalia Jackson. Rose's grandson Ellison is possibly gay and her granddaughter Violet is dating a black ikebanist named Bo. Violet's sister Iris, is the playwright who is revealing her family through this play, all the while pondering the mysterious disappearance of her father Luther (a secret that is perhaps being kept from them all by Rose's son Woodman).The play is written in a fragmeted post-modern style, the construction of each scene based on a japanese flower arrangement. The metaphor of 'arrangement' links to the arrangement of reality required to keep a secret, the ikebanist's arrangement of flowers to evoke an emotion, God's arrangement of people into their fates, and the playwright's arrangement of characters within her world. The blur of reality and play factors into the shifting core of a bicultural protagonist.
Summary: In a makeshift shack in Angeles Crest Forest outside of Los Angeles, Em, a woman in her late 1930s, is trying to get rid of Fa, a punky t.v. freak of a mid-twenties man. Em, an acid-head, had given Fa a tab 8 years ago and he's never quite recovered. Fried. Em invites her sister Da who flies in from Germany. Da has long ago fled the family and has genetically shifted--she appears black to us. Em has also invited her writer friend, Go, an ethnic man who passes for white. Go is visiting to perhaps spark up a romance with Em--he's also a gay man who passes for straight--as if a change in lifestyle would lessen the danger of disease. As they trip, Go hallucinates the presence of Rick Springfield, Da of her 100-year old grandmother Yu. Go realizes he cannot participate in Em's gridlock of a life, they leave back to Los Angeles as Da and Fa find camaraderie.
Two versions in archive. Summary: General Sun, a once-powerful commander in the Chinese Nationalist army, turns 100 years old in the San Fernando Valley, where family and culture is breaking down. He lives with his son Ho Ping and family. Known as Yeh Yeh (paternal grandfather) he longs to escape the modern world which can no longer absorb him: his grandson Sonny is the quintessential Valley Dude, his daughter-in-law Ni Lee has frozen from the failure of her ice-skating daughter, his own son Ho Ping treats him as a child. His granddaughter, Twila, returns home after a five year absence and triggers a thaw in the Sun family. Monkey King and Eight Pig, two mythic characters from Chinese folk tales, as well as Buddha and May Lee, his "death muse", try to woo Yeh Yeh to the other side while his grandchildren try to recover from being casualities of Asian overachievement and growing up different in suburbia.
Summary: Christina, a middle-aged, barren shopper, and Bat, an ex-con mall rat course through the Durock Mall during an endless Christmas season. This particular mall is populated with characters based on a Religious Studies course (the Darker Concept of Self: East and West) taught by Prof. Mark Unno at Brown University. If each 'store' could represent a different century or philosophical thought, then shopping would consist more of finding a spiritual belief than of pure product consumption. Some of the prototypes for the mallfolk include Shinran, Kant, Hsun Tze, Beavis & Butthead, Kierkegaard, Dogen, Simone Weil, Chuang Tse and Albert Camus. Each ensemble member has a map of existence, at one moment playing a character, at another moment an object in a window. The mall here is the cultural cathedral of our time, at one moment a game show at another a fashion show, later a beauty pageant; it is the seminal hypertext metaphor, as our narrative through the mall is never the same.
Work-in progress.
Summary: In three parts, moving backwards in time.
Includes photographs and playbills.
Summary: Full-length play about two sisters, one domesticated and one with the power of flight, who reunite after 15 years to deal with their telepathic, dying mother. The play takes place in the present and the characters are Japanese American. (Note that Hiro's ability to fly is magical, real and metaphorical and should be achieved in production without cables and other technical distractions.)
Summary: Beni is a Japanese American woman wants to visit Italy, but Sam, who is a mixture of several ethnicities and a lover of Asian cultures and languages, tries to get her to delve into her "own heritage" first. To complicate matters Beni is trying to end a highly-sexed relationship with her neighbor Paul, a Japanese/Chinese American who is picking up African drumming. She also finds herself intrigued by a silent Asian woman who leaves messages in red chalk on the sidewalk and walls. Hobbies confronts the various shades of multiculturalism. It examines a person's right to study another culture as a journey towards self-identification as well as the danger of taking on a hobby to satisfy an ethnic fetish.
Solo performance piece. Includes a video of performance. Summary: A multi-disciplinary piece that tells of a girl whose body is marked by a blue jewel-like map. These marks reveal stories of her Jewish and Chicana neighbors, blindfolded bubble blowers, love and violence among Asians, and a grandmother's fiery suicide.
Work-in-progress. Includes future development notes.summary: New Humans is the third part in a trilogy of solo performances. Summary: The piece explores human kind's abilities to relate in spite of differences as we approach "the artificial landmark The-Year-Two-Thousand."
Includes staged reading flyers and videotapes. Summary: a story about inter-generational conflict within two families-Filipino-American and Afro-Filipino-American-and takes place in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1972. Gemma, a young college student becomes politicized against the Vietnam War when her beloved brother and cousin-a Navy medic and a Marine-return home as casualties of war. She visits her shell-shocked, heavily medicated cousin in his room. She also visits her brother who is imprisoned in a U.S. military jail. Gemma clashes with her mother and aunties-immigrant warbrides from the more popular World War II-over traditional values, parental authority and a very politicized America of the 70s. When Gemma's invalid cousin unexpectedly explodes into self-destruction, it is a mixed blessing of pain and consciousness for all.
Co-authored with members of Sining Bayan.
Co-authored with members of Sining Bayan.
Includes articles and playbills. Co-authored with members of Sining Bayan. Summary: A historical drama in three acts with Prologue and Epilogue about plantation life in Hawaii in the 1930s and the labor struggle of Filipinos and other ethnic communities.
Summary: Play is about the experiences of individuals from the Filipino- American Community from 1946-66. Based on the original play, "Visions of a Warbride".
Includes production flyers. Summary: A heartbreaking comedy that opens with the Lim family celebrating their new status as American citizens. Each family member pursues their distinct , glossy vision of the Great American Dream : Julie dreams of starring with Robert Redford, Daisy lands a cooking show on TV, Henry dreams of running his own business, Mark fantasizes about jamming with Mick Jagger, and Alice spreads Christianity like butter. The race is on for who can and who is a Chinese American and a bona fide American.
Recipient of Roger L. Stevens Incentive Awards and the first Katherine and Lee Chilcote Award for Most Innovative Play With Socio-economic Significance. Includes a with review and playbill. Summary: Tapir Inc. dares you to play a fast-paced game of liar's poker. In "Junk Bonds," a young Asian American woman fights her way into the clubby, high rolling world of Wall Street. Immense wealth, glamorous career and intoxicating power are at stake in pursuit of a fat slice of American pie. This dizzying play flies along with a biting blend of money and mistrust, bluff and betrayal. Come see the ferocious comedy that prefigured the scandalous headlines. The play has 2 acts and 6 characters.
Summary: Story about how a Chinese American/Jewish American couple struggle to redefine themselves and their family.
Summary: Story about LYNDON WU's struggle to please his father without losing his self. With Chinese, American, Chinese-American and Wall Street cultures clashing and threatening all relationships, LYNDON must look beyond traditional solutions to prevail.
Summary: Trayf, the Yiddish word for non-kosher food, serves as a metaphor for happiness as a Chinese American Woman looks to her past and present in two Jewish American men.
Includes two reviews and a brochure. Summary: A humorous journey that follows the relationship between a man and a woman through several reincarnations. Trapped between love and fear, dream and reality, remembering and forgetting, each tries to figure out: "Why am I back, and why with you?" and "what am I supposed to remember so I don't have to come back again?" This play uses dream, mythology and folktales as well as an interdisciplinary approach of theater, eclectic dance movement and a musical fusion of Asian, Western, recorded and live instrumentation.
Summary: This stylized theater piece reveals the internal conflict of a Chinese American woman whose identity is split between her Chinese culture and her American world. The struggle between Asian consciousness and White consciousness takes place in an elevator and incorporates poetry and some movement.
Includes several workshop versions, final versions, and cast list. Summary: Rendition of the Prometheus myth. Prometheus defies Zeus in order to bring fire to his Mudstick friends. As punishment, Zeus condemns him to the chains of Mt. Scythia for eternity. Even with the urging of his cousin Hephastus to offer an apology for what he has done, Prometheus refuses and accepts his punishment. While incapacitated, his Mudstick friends tell him stores and perform renditions of his encounters with Zeus. Finally, when the Mudsticks offer to take his place, Zeus is moved by their compassion and reverence to Prometheus and frees him.
Two versions in collection. Summary: An alien force has taken over the American legal system and people are turning into potatoes.
Summary: Boyd the swallow and Prince Oskar, the convertible, both outcasts, help unhappy humans (a young soccer player suffering from low self esteem and a starving writer) and along the way build a memorable friendship.
Summary: Loosely based on the life of silent film star Anna May Wong, chronicles four decades of her struggle within the Hollywood film system.
Summary: James, a high strung architect, encounters Kuan Yin, Goddess of Mercy, and must come to terms with buried feelings towards his father and his past.
Three versions, along with synopsis, brochure, playbill and review. Summary: The struggle of a Chinese American television reporter to cover the escalating unrest between Blacks and Koreans in New York City.
Summary: Masculinity and intergenerational conflict is explored on the golf course. Four captains of industry tease, play, and joke with each other about their fortunes as they get ready to tee off.
Two versions, with synopsis, articles, brochure, photo and press release. Summary: Chronicles the ten year friendship between two women, one Chinese and the other Chinese American, culminating in the l989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. A full-length, one-act drama.
Summary: The 80 year old matriarch of two Chinese American families dies - or does she? A two-act comedy about family secrets and attempts to keep them.
All American Girl, Television Script.
All American Girl, Television Script Series.
Summary: Performance piece utilizing Japanese movement, dance and theater forms, especially Butoh, to satirize stereotypes and self-perceptions of Japanese American woman.
Summary: Performance piece utilizing Japanese movement, martial arts, Noh and circus to satirize stereotypes and self-perception of Asian males.
Previously titled "Godzilla comes to Little Tokyo." Summary: Musical situated in the capital of the Pacific Rim, L.A., in which an elderly homeless sansei man by the name Manzanar Murakami, self proclaimed first sansei born in the camps, befriends a runaway gosei (fifth generation) adolescent, and together encounter the monster, GiLAwrecks, unearthed beneath Manzanar, old site of the Japanese American internment camp.
Summary: Performance piece styled after Bizet's opera Carmen, satirizing the Japan America trade conflict, cross cultural confusion and the good/bad roles of Japanese and American women.
Includes reviews on file, along with a flyer for the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts' November 1992 production. Summary: Social outcasts are thrown together in America's concentration camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. In theis changing
Summary: Woman visits her single daughter and has a delightful dream of love and desire.
Includes reviews and a newspaper article. Summary: A Japanese woman with an unworkable dream is exiled to an American desert. Her survival depends on keeping her dream alive. An eleven year old girl watches and grows up in that year of observation.
Summary: An elderly stroke victim, relying on her daughter for creature-comforts, has stopped talking and, turning inward, tries to ferret out the truths of her life.
Summary: The residents of this dead end street are all losers in the eyes of mainstream society, but their lives work as they make painful adjustments and discover the meaning of love.
Summary: Two Japanese Americans stranded in Japan before World War II are bound together by the English language, a pair of skis, and a Shirley Temple doll. They fall in love, survive the deprivations of a terrible war, return to America and in the midst of plenty, they divorce.
Summary: An episodic play about a Japanese American woman from the afternoon of her seduction at 17 to 67 when she meets her lover again (using the music of the time).
Copy and original draft. Summary: An old man recalls the two days he spent in Tuscon in his youth.
Includes a playbill for the January 1990 production at the East West Players, reviews and pictures. Summary: Chiang Ching, widow of Mao Tse Tung, languishes in a prison hospital. Through her recurring dreams and nightmares she relives her past and her tumultuous climb to the top and her downfall.
Includes reviews on file along with playbill from the East West Players' February 1986 production, pictures and assorted information on Yale Repertory Theatre's 1987 production. Summary: An ancient mask comes to haunt a spinster. Endowed with a history of jealousy and revenge, it slowly brings back its bitter past paralleling the spinsters own life and engulfing her.
Two versions, with reviews, a playbill, pictures, a brochure from the New York Shakespeare Festivals 1980 production, and two pages of copies of the original handwritten draft of the play. Summary: A widow, struggling to support her children on a farm during the depression, hires a violin-playing itinerant; both mother and daughter fall in love with him.
Summary: Two sisters, one a domineering spinster, the other a terminally ill divorcee, come to terms with their past while planning a short trip.
Includes reviews on file, along with a flyer for the UCLA Center for the Performing Arts' November 1992 production. Summary: Social outcasts are thrown together in America's concentration camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. In theis changing, limiting environment, they take charge of their lives and make choices. that dark night".
Summary: A one-act play with music based on the well-known Japanese folktale about a boy found inside a peach by an old childless couple who grows up to fight the Evil Demon with the help of three animal friends: dog, monkey and pheasant.
Summary: One-act comedy examining the relationship between two Asian American actors who are trying to "make it" in the Big Apple.
Summary: Examines the relationship between a Sansei daughter and her Nisei father over a thirty year period; from a five year old questioning her racial identity, a college student rebelling against parental values to an adult and mother who comes to accept who she is and who her father is.
Summary: A two-act play about two sisters who get together during the Christmas holidays. A dinner party turns into disaster when the older sister's husband accuses the younger sister's date of being a homosexual.
Summary: The baptism of the first grandchild occasions a family reunion where unresolved past conflicts arise. Two act domestic drama.