ShareDiana Son: Back in Orbit
by Terry Hong
Diana Son. Photo by Michal Daniel.
Diana Son first set foot in the Public Theater in 1983, as a Dover, Del., high school senior, to see Hamlet. Serendipitously for Son, this was not a production true to the Bard’s original vision—it featured a woman, Diane Venora, in the title role. “I loved that production because Hamlet was played by a woman—and that made the character more accessible to me,” Son says. And she tucked away that gender-bender notion for future use.
Son studied with Anne Bogart at Playwrights Horizons, and then spent a lonely part of 1993 at the Iowa Playwrights Workshop (“My phone bills were never so high”) before returning to New York (and the Public) as one of six playwrights in the Asian American Playwrights Lab led by dramaturg/playwright Chiori Miyagawa. “I thought then that Diana was a brave and bold writer who was going to change the expectations placed on Asian-American playwrights by the mainstream,” says Miyagawa. “She has not disappointed.” Indeed, Son was the breakout voice of the lab with her one-act R.A.W. (‘Cause I’m a Woman)—the letters stand for Raunchy Asian Woman—which probed the angry, questioning voices of Asian-American women tired of repelling false stereotypes.
Son’s next hit was her gender-bender BOY, an unconscious homage to that production of Hamlet. “The first three words I ever read in a Diana Son play are a dead giveaway of important, exuberant, delicious work,” says Todd London, the artistic director of New Dramatists, where Son held a seven-year residency. “They were the first words of a cast list: ‘Boy, a girl.’ It’s a detail that carries a worldview.” Born the fourth daughter to a family praying for a son, Boy is brought up believing that he is just as his name states, until he inevitably learns the shocking truth. BOY opened the 1996 season at La Jolla Playhouse in California and introduced Son to director Michael Greif. “I flipped over it,” recalls Greif. “I loved the tension between the absurdist cartoony veneer and the truthful, painful issues that the play had at its center. I recognized an idiosyncratic and truthful new voice.”
While BOY made the regional rounds, Son’s next play, Fishes, opened in 1998, first at People’s Light and Theatre Company outside Philadelphia and then at New Georges in New York. In Fishes, Son turns her attention to the depths of a mother-daughter relationship—through the use of fantasy. Junebug’s fervent prayers for her dead mother’s return brings her back as, well ... a fish. “What drew me in,” says Susan Bernfield, artistic director of New Georges, “was this very playful theatricality, this willingness to create vibrant worlds with broad strokes.”
Then came Stop Kiss, the phenomenally successful play that brought Son back to the Public, then catapulted her into national—and international—view. The play was extended three times and became one of the longest-running shows during artistic director George C. Wolfe’s tenure. The story is deceptively simple: Newcomer-to-New-York Sara finds friendship with seasoned-city-girl Callie. Surprised to find their relationship developing into something more, they share a first kiss in a park and are violently attacked.
Ironically, some of Stop Kiss’s success—more than 100 productions worldwide—disconcerts Son. “The play’s introduction specifically says that the cast should reflect the racial diversity of New York City,” says Son, whose original cast featured Korean-Canadian Oh and African-American actors Kevin Carroll and Saundra McClain in supporting roles. “But I was so confused and upset that many of the subsequent productions had white casts, even in a city as diverse as London! I felt so alienated from productions of Stop Kiss that were all-white. That is not the kind of work I want to contribute to American theatre.
“In Satellites, I made the conscious decision to write ethnic-specific characters for the first time,” she goes on. In fact, Son wrote the role of Korean-American Nina specifically for Oh and Nina’s African-American husband Miles for Carroll.
“We’ve all heard stories about interracial relationships, so we know what the conflicts are. That doesn’t feel fresh to me,” says Son. “Everything I write is essentially about identity, but this time I wanted to create something racially complex. I wanted the play to be about two characters who did not have a sense of their ethnic identities. Miles, although he’s African American, was adopted by a white family and raised in a white neighborhood. Nina had Korean parents, but she never learned the language and was not exposed to Korean culture. I titled the play Satellites because all of the characters are free-floating. A satellite is an entity that orbits around a larger entity; all of the characters lack a defining thing within their lives, so they end up colliding into each other.”
While Son insists the play is not autobiographical in its specifics—in fact, she jokingly reports her husband would like a disclaimer that the role of Miles is not based on him in any way—Satellites is certainly her most personal play yet. “Ever since I had a baby five years ago, I’ve been interested in portraying motherhood in a way that it has not been seen before,” says Son. “I’ve seen mothers portrayed as unreasonable and self-involved, but I have personally found that becoming a mother demanded that I be selfless in a way that I had never been.”
Reprinted with permission from American Theatre Magazine, May 2006. Terry Hong is the media arts consultant for the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program.
