Lauren Yee is an award-winning playwright based in New York. Her most recent play, Cambodian Rock Band, was the recipient of the 2018 Horton Foote Prize for Outstanding New American Play. You can find a schedule of upcoming performances of Cambodian Rock Band and her other plays here. She is interviewed here by APALA member Amanda M. Cheung.
Amanda M. Cheung (AC): Please introduce yourself and briefly describe your literary work and career path to date.
Lauren Yee (LY): I’m a playwright and TV writer who was born and raised in San Francisco, now living in New York City. My first plays were written for bad actors. In high school, I founded a theater company where we wrote and produced our own original plays and I did this without ever having worked in theater to begin with. It was a lot of the blind leading the blind; I didn’t know anything about the medium, but I tried to make educated guesses about how I thought the theater worked. (Half the time I was right.)
Ever since then, I’ve continued writing plays, and I am endlessly in love with the theater, how a work can come alive simply by gathering people together in a space and reading the work out loud. It’s about the magic of the room, how you can never recreate that combination of elements exactly after a show closes. That’s the joy and heartbreak of the theater: you had to have been to fully appreciate. (If you ever watch a recording of a theater piece, you’ll see what I mean. It is ALWAYS terrible recorded.)
AC: Your recent works King of the Yees and Cambodian Rock Band both explore the complexities of father-daughter relationships. What is it about this particular bond that you find to be most unique and worthy of closer examination?
LY: I feel like every writer has their own Ur-story, a narrative that they find compelling. Mine happens to be about parents and their children (frequently father daughter relationships) about legacy and history and the transfer of information from one generation to another. For whatever reason this is the story that haunts me and moves me and makes me want to write. Perhaps it’s something in my own relationship with my family. Despite that bond being pretty darned good, I’m constantly discovering things about my family that I never really knew, that no one thought to tell me. And I find that that’s something a lot of people go through. Parents don’t know how to tell their kids things, and kids don’t know how to initiate those conversations. In a way, my plays serve as an opening for audiences to begin talking about stuff like that. That would be my hope at least.
AC: How does your own personal diversity influence your writing? What are the challenges of writing authentically about cultures outside of your own?
LY: I’m most comfortable and dexterous in my writing when I’m dealing with something that’s in my own experience. I just know it better. I know the pitfalls and pain associated with it, I also know the funny nuances. I’ve lived it. When I’m dealing with something outside of myself (which is necessarily part of the job of a writer, to imagine characters and worlds that are not you), it takes me longer. It takes more research, more talking to folks, more listening, and more thinking about what would be an interesting take on this character (and on the other side, what’s already been done to death). And I need to find the heart of the character that I can relate to, where do I overlap with them. There are very very few characters out there that are just like me (the fictitious version of myself in King of the Yees is probably the only one that’s really squarely within my experience), so this kind of rigor and thoughtfulness is something that I have to bring to a lot of my writing, whether I’m portraying a Khmer Rouge survivor or a Beijing-born Chinese basketball coach coming of age during the Cultural Revolution. How to make them compelling and contradictory and deep.
AC: Who were your literary heroes growing up?
LY: Growing up, I craved people who looked like me doing their thing in the literary world. And there were few. Or at least it felt like it. It felt like there was Amy Tan and not really anyone else. And I loved reading Joy Luck Club, so there’s nothing wrong with Amy Tan, but when that’s the only example that exists for you to follow, there’s something wrong with that. There should be more examples for a young writer than, “Oh, you write? Like Amy Tan?”
AC: Have you had any serendipitous or noteworthy moments while conducting library or archival research for your projects?
LY: Doing the research for Cambodian Rock Band was a trip in terms of research. Because the play is about a whole chunk of music history that should have never been heard (the Khmer Rouge’s attempt to destroy Cambodia’s entire modern music history), a lot of the music that remains is scattered, uncategorized, and hard to find. So it was less of me searching through a library archive and more of me going down a YouTube rabbit hole trying to find videos of Cambodian oldies that people had posted online. It was literally like reconstructing this musical history that almost had been lost.
AC: In the last few years, there has been an exciting and unprecedented deluge of works by Asian American writers entering the mainstream. Are there any under-the-radar talents whom we should be looking out for?
LY: If we’re talking Asian American playwrights, I love Christopher Chen, Julia Cho, Mike Lew, and so, so many others. And then there are a really exciting number of Asian American writers working in other mediums, like graphic novelists Thi Bui and Gene Luen Yang. There’s just a greater range of styles and perspectives reflected, and the sense of humor is there. It always irks me how Asian American narratives are frequently promoted as educational, nutritional, “you should read/watch this because it’s boring and it’s important to learn things” type content. To me, that’s ridiculous and completely ignores how vibrant, funny, sexy, and incredible these characters and stories can be.
I’m also really excited by how many of the up-and-coming writers are the children of Vietnamese refugees who have grown up and now are showing us a side of the history that’s deeply personal and so much more nuanced than previous narratives. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer and Qui Nguyen’s Vietgone are two stories that remind me of this.
AC: Five of your plays will be staged in multiple productions throughout North America in 2019, and you’re currently writing for the upcoming Netflix series Mixtape. Is there a medium you’d like to tackle next? What’s your dream project?
LY: I love musicals. I want to write a musical. Or some version of a musical. In my mind, it’s less of a traditional musical and more a piece that folds kickass music into the world of the play. Our real lives are more than just words and people talking; they include music and movement and spectacle, I want to fold all of that into a piece.
I also love tap dance, and always wanted to take lessons as a child but never got around to that. A musical with tap dance, maybe?
You can follow Lauren on Instagram @mslaurenyee
Editing assistance provided by Shanna Kim.