With a Fan Called Theatre



Forward

     Winter quarter of my freshman year, I was
drafted for the play, The Crucible, to recreate 
the Salem witch trials.  I have a photo pinned to
a rectangle of cardboard, my oval Asian head with
hair pulled back under a white bonnet.  AATP 
(Asian American Theater Project -- brainchild of 
David Henry Hwang during his Stanford days)
wanted to do a very American play.  The director 
said parallels could be drawn between Puritan 
immigrants:witchhunts and white Americans:
internment.  As a warning to future generations,
tv screens documenting the roundup and imprisonment
of Japanese-Americans flashed in the lobby.


1.

Auditions were almost by invitation,
"You have an interest?  Come try out."

"Read this."  Though I couldn't tell
what they were looking for.  Out of

twenty, it seemed, fifteen were chosen,
only a few with prior experience, and out

of those, most with AATP.

And the directing was strange, to me,
not a matter of character, or

gestures, or of a line-of-action
that had its own story, but of

where to stand for visibility,
when to cross, and mostly standing.


2a.

Tape measures held by white hands snaked about 
my waist, breasts, thighs; naked in front of 
them, they appeared to serve us, but the winding
was for our banding.

We applied our own makeup, the foundation, the rouge,
the eyeliner, the lipstick; both men and women, preening
for our show.

An Iranian-French woman who clasped my eyehooks in the
back noticed my wool dress became progressively harder 
to close, expansion past the confines of my costume.

Jokes and conversations in Chinese, Taiwanese; a preserve
of "natural" habitat, trained by parents who made their
young attend afterschool or weekend schools, and speak
the language at home; continuing our species, forgetting
all the while, more than a billion Chinese were still in
the wild.

Pronunciation lessons: wide mouth curling, her ego as broad
as her waist and her air of professional disdain, British 
English speaker, strutting for not having been picked by plumage.

One night, a white zoo visitor came to my dressing room, throwing
flowers my way, with his child from an ex-marriage, proposing
half-jokingly.

Waiting eagerly under the stage, for that moment to 
climb the stair and spread our preened wings in front 
of a captive audience.


2b.

Ostriches, with hopes of becoming flamingos -- 
rather than aspiring to be star ostriches 
amidst flamingoes, put to shame.  Cutting a
paper-thin opening in a screen, with a fan 
called theatre, we found ourselves again
in an alcove of Asian-Americanness.


Afterward

     Months later, in passing we still greet each other, asking 
about our lives, about acting, as if freed now, our memory of 
captivity is strong enough to confer camaraderie.



--jennifer crystal chien