BEYOND THE SILK ROAD: STAGING A QUEER ASIAN AMERICA IN CHAY YEW'S PORCELAIN

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Spring 2004 by Diehl, Heath A

RISQUÉ DRAMATURGIES

Although Yew is a relative "newcomer" to the international theatre scene, his plays and production work have increasingly garnered positive attention from critics and theatre-goers since his first play was produced in the late-1980s. Details of his biography are sketchy. He was born in Singapore in the mid-1960s and emigrated with his family to the United States at the age of twelve. In the early 1980s, Yew enrolled at Pepperdine University, but later he transferred to Boston University where he majored in communications. After graduating, Yew traveled to his native Singapore, where he worked as a playwright for TheatreWorks, the country's first professional theatre company. In 1988, TheatreWorks included a slot for an AIDS play in the production season; Yew agreed to write the play for the modest fee of $500. The play that resulted, As If He Hears, at first did not pass governmental censors, but it was produced several rewrites later.

From Singapore, Yew moved to London, where he briefly served as playwright-in-residence at the Mu-Lan Theatre. In 1995, Yew traveled to Los Angeles when he was named resident artist and director of the Asian Theatre Workshop at the Mark Taper Forum. On 20 April 1995, Yew's play A Language of Their Own premiered at the New York Public Theatre; this play would go on to win a GLAAD Media Award for Best Play of the Year, a George and Elisabeth Marton Playwriting Award, and a Lammy nomination for the published edition. The following year, Yew's trilogy of chamber plays-which includes A Language of Their Own, Half Lives, and Porcelain-was presented in a six-hour production by the East West Players in Eos Angeles. In 1998, he won the Robert Chesley Playwriting Award, and Red opened in Seattle. Since Red, Yew has written The Courage to Stand Alone and A Beautiful Country (a performance piece featuring a drag queen named Miss Visa Denied).

Among Yew's diverse corpus of writing and production over the past decade or so, Porcelain stands as one of his most controversial pieces. The play began as a film script that Yew penned for his senior thesis project at Boston University, but at the time, the project was short-lived. As Yew recalls, "Because it was so risqué-very violent about anonymous sex in the toilets-no college student wanted to audition" (qtd. in Drukman 59). Yew shelved the piece until 1992, when he reworked it for the stage while playwright-in-residence at Eondon's Mu-Ean Theatre. Porcelain premiered on 12 May 1992, at the Etcetera Theatre Club in Eondon; on 4 August 1992, the play transferred to the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs. That year, Porcelain won Eondon's Fringe Award for best play. Since its first production, Porcelain has been produced in regional theatres throughout the United States and has appeared in Performing Ark Journal, an anthology of contemporary gay drama titled Staging Gay Lives, and, along with A Language of Their Own, in its own Grove Press edition in 1997. That Yew has had two of his plays published in their own editions places him among the ranks of such world-renowned Asian American playwrights as Frank Chin and David Henry Hwang.