Dramatic Lessons : Playwright Uses Humor to Teach Racial Understanding and Inner-City Hope

My mission in doing theater is to change attitudes, to create more awareness of one person to another.

“Tokyo Bound” is about my experience in Japan and how it impacted my sense of my cultural heritage, which is half Japanese, half Finnish. It also impacted how I related to my mother. My mother doesn’t speak English very well, and it wasn’t until I learned Japanese and was able to understand her that I saw her in another way.

“Beside Myself” is about both my childhood and my experiences in the riots. I can understand how it could feel really good to burn things down and steal stuff. I felt that part of the riots was a built-up anger that comes from years and years of slights.

I grew up poor and multiracial. It made me feel as if I didn’t have a lot of options. But as I was writing “Beside Myself,” I found I also had to take responsibility for being part of the problem. All of us are passing judgment on people because of where they live, what kind of clothes they wear, what kind of cars they drive. I’m making judgments constantly about people, and they’re often not positive judgments.

“Reunion” is my mother’s story. It’s about the choices you make in life.

“Beside Myself” speaks to the ills of the community and is harder to accept because I don’t think people are ready to take responsibility, especially in the sense of the riots, in which people hurt their own neighbors. I look at the rage of oppression that comes out in strange ways by stealing from and burning down businesses.

When I was a kid, I never thought being Japanese-Finnish would have been positive for me because I was just miserable. Now I’m happy being multiracial. It’s fun having such a diverse cultural background, and it’s become fodder for quite a bit of writing and performing.

I wanted to get into Japanese theater several years ago when I lived in Japan, but because I was multiracial, foreign and a woman, it was really hard to be taken seriously as an actor.

Here, if you go to a theater audition, usually a play is written by a guy, and there will be six roles for guys, and maybe one role for a girlfriend, wife or mother. There’ll be 200 girls auditioning for the three female parts, and there’ll be 30 guys auditioning for the men’s parts. There’s always a lot of competition. Right now, there’s very little work for people of color.

Teaching high school and college students improvisation classes at East/West Players in Silver Lake, I want the young people not to think of success as a goal. The process of acting--of learning the craft--is the goal. They will be successful, possibly quite early in their lives, if they keep the craft going.

I use humor in my writing because it softens the way the message goes through. That’s why comedy is so popular, why sitcoms are all over the tube, because people are so miserable. Sitcoms offer temporary relief. They have the potential of giving us some insight and hope, but I don’t think they necessarily do that.

It’s been interesting to see the ranges of audiences depending on where my play is showing. I feel special when I make a difference with an Asian American audience. I don’t specifically write for them, but what I’ve done impacts them in a very deep way.

The Finns who are aware of me are very supportive. If there is anything remotely Finnish alluded to in my shows, they feel they are being validated. I have been to Finland, and some day I plan to focus more on the Finnish side of my experience.

I hope I’m some sort of role model in that I’ve broken the rules. I’m not a beauty queen, I’m not white, I’m not blond. And my background did not seem to suggest that theater was an option.

I work with kids as much as I can. It’s terrifying to be around kids, especially from the inner-city, who have no sense of hope. My work helps them obtain some hope. They have to look at me and say, “How come she thinks she can do it?”

And it’s not as though I am this huge success, but I have, as I’m performing, a good sense of myself. And that’s something I try to impart. That success isn’t exactly material stuff, but the process of being who you can be, of creating your own identity.