Looking to the Past to Connect the Future

Playwright Lloyd Suh has been telling Asian stories for most of his career. From The Chinese Lady, which tells the story of Afong Moy, the first Chinese woman in the United States, to The Heart Sellers, which explores the Asian immigrant experience in the 1970s following the landmark Hart-Celler Act of 1965, his work interrogates U.S. history to understand our present and dream a new tomorrow for Asian Americans. With his latest play, The Far Country, a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize, Lloyd examines the Chinese Exclusion Act and its impact on immigration and the lives of the almost 175,000 Chinese people who passed through Angel Island.

Berkeley Rep staff sat down with Lloyd for a conversation about The Far Country and how he feels the past informs the future. Here are highlights from the conversation:

ON THE ORIGINAL INSPIRATION FOR THE PLAY

I’ve been writing about Asian-American history for a while kind of accidentally. I never set out to. I would be doing research for one play, and I’d come across a story that stuck with me and I couldn’t shake it. I had to sit with it longer and I had to write about it. Then doing more research would lead to another story and another story. And the whole time everything was circling around the exclusion era. It felt like that was the fulcrum where so much of what we know now in terms of geographies, formations of Chinatowns, economic and legislative realities, and stereotypes have their roots. So, I knew I wanted to write about it somehow. I just never felt ready, or it always felt so big. But then I had a commission for Atlantic Theater Company, and I was like, okay, I have support, I’m among friends. And I just said it aloud. I said this play is going to be about the exclusion era and Angel Island. And in saying that aloud, I committed to doing it. Once I committed to the idea, I started to mentally do what one must do to honor the weight of what that is. I was in San Francisco in November 2019 for my production of The Chinese Lady at the Magic Theatre, and when you go out the back door at the Magic you can see Angel Island and I was like “Okay, I’m going to go.” I went with the mission of feeling the ghosts and the weight of that history. And I left feeling ready to write it.

ON WRITING PLAYS THAT CONNECT HISTORY AND PEOPLE

Writing about this specific era of history over several plays made me realize that they’re all connected to each other. And that isn’t something that I was conscious of while writing them. But when I look at these plays all together, The Chinese Lady, The Heart Sellers, and The Far Country, I think about the reason I even set out to do this in the first place. I have aging parents and growing children. In writing, I was trying to find a way to tell my parents’ story to my children, to connect all of us, my parents, my children, and myself on this continuum.

Every one of these plays is rooted in history, and yet in every one of these plays, somebody talks about the future. And when they talk about the future, I think they’re talking about the next play to follow, but they’re also talking about us. So, for any Asian American, or American, or anyone who’s interested in engaging with that history, it means engaging with what it means to be a citizen, what it means to be part of that continuum. And especially for Asian Americans, who I think a lot of us have been separated from this history, I want them to feel like it belongs to them. I want actors to feel like these are their plays, their stories, and that audiences feel this story is theirs, too.

ON REVISITING THE PLAY FOR BERKELEY REP

I’m totally rewriting the middle section. I felt like I never really got it, and the version we staged in New York did what it needed to do, but I feel like I made choices based on time and practicalities in a way that I felt like if I get another crack at this, I’m going to try something bigger. So, I’m trying something that’s more of my original impulse, which is that it’s a combination of an oral history and a kind of conjuring that reflects Moon Gyet’s experience on Angel Island. Sometimes it’s hard to hear history when it’s told to you as facts, but when it’s presented to you as questions, it changes the way we engage with it. It makes us ask our own questions. So, I feel like the previous version was like, “Hey, let me tell you about Angel Island,” and here it’s going to be more of “This is what it felt like.” That’s the impulse. I’m trying to make it more tactile, more experiential.

ON HOW THE PAST RESONATES TODAY

I wrote a very quick first draft, impulsive, incomplete, just scenes really, that we read at the end of January 2020 at the Atlantic. And then suddenly in March 2020 there was no prospect of doing theatre and writing a play felt like a silly thing to do. So, in writing during that time, there are so many things that I think are unavoidable in the play: isolation, loneliness, disconnection, but also engaging with history. Engaging with this country or this world’s relationship with what it is to be a person, a citizen in a country that has the history that we have, particularly around race, how legislation ties in with all of that, and where legislation comes from. That was what was on the news every day. And so that was part of what was in my head every day.

In 2020, feeling that this play might not be done anytime soon, I started to think about the audience as a future tense thing. I started to think about what’s portable. What is something that can mean something to anybody anytime? And so, I started thinking about what it is just to think about the past and to think about the future. I like to think whenever any of the characters in these plays talk about the future, their grandchildren, or great-grandchildren that me or my peers could sit in the audience and think, “Oh, that’s me. They’re talking about me.” I feel like that’s my relationship to the future tense that I think about when I’m writing these plays. I’m thinking about my 8-year-old when he’s my age. Is this going to mean anything to him? How can I make it mean something? I want this history to be something people can own and feel like it’s theirs. I want my 8-year-old to feel connected to these stories and be like “Yeah, this is part of me.”