OF BY ZI
OPTIMISM ADRENALINE AND
ALIKHAN
Nothing can really prepare you for a phone call from your artistic director, 20 minutes before opening-night curtain, saying, “Zi, we have to cancel the show tonight”—unless you’ve been making your play through the birth and height of Omicron. Then, dear reader, you are prepared for anything. Rehearsal started on December 21. The meet-and-greet was a joyous gathering of staff and makers from Portland Center Stage and Artists Repertory Theatre, the two institutions collaborating on our production of Lauren Yee’s The Great Leap, the first play “back” for both theatres that’d had no work or considerations made for it prior to the start of the pandemic. The room felt electric: 60 or so teammates in a rehearsal hall again, christening this play for its voyage with speeches and well wishes, optimism hanging in the air, and the adrenaline of the “first day of school” in the veins of the artists who were about to embark. It feels important to mention that this optimism and adrenaline didn’t just magically appear in our room that day, that they were not there by accident or happenstance, that they were the product of process. The moment I knew this was going to be a project that would be a major barometer for how I lead a company of makers into the future was my very first conversation with PCS’s Artistic Director Marissa Wolf and Production Manager Katie Nguyen. In several experiences before this one, before the pandemic, I found myself in meetings with artistic leaders where it became very clear that my hiring was more about creating a “diverse narrative” on a grant application than my experience, skills, or story. I found myself fighting to be heard, fighting to be seen, sometimes even just fighting to be looked at instead of the older, white colleague sitting next to me in the production meeting. With Marissa and Katie, our first conversation started with “How do you see the world of the play? What do you need,” without caveat, their eyes looking into mine, separated only by the mechanics of Zoom. The care of this simple moment opened the doors to such radical honesty in our early conversations. This emboldened me to approach each subsequent conversation, interaction, meeting, and moment of
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rehearsal starting from that care, starting from their deeply collaborative approach and reaching into my own, always beginning with “How do you, my colleague, see this world? What do you need?” One of the first doors this honesty opened was around my desire to hire an all APIidentifying team to collaborate on this play. Curating teams with intention in a way that considers the players beyond actors and writers is a major tenet of my directorial ethos, and one that is shockingly hard to get supported when the considerations of money and prior relationships to an institution come into play. When I brought this up for Great Leap, what I was not expecting was an immediate “Of course”—but that’s exactly what I got. From here, we hired a dream team of makers to bring our story to life with: Chika Shimizu (scenic), Cha See (lights), Fan Zhang (sound), Nicole Wee (costumes), Sunny Hitt (movement), Barbie Wu (associate direction), Kristen Mun (stage management), and Andrea Zee (casting). This team was already unlike any I’d ever known assembled: we are all API-identifying, I am the only maleidentifying member of the team, and half of the group was born outside the United States. Redefining a mold simply in our coming together, all made possible by the simplicity of a “Yes” from an institution, our process was off to a start full of support and engagement, a start that asked each of us to continue considering our own methods of care as we began collaborating with each other and our teams over the next several months. And now—flash-forward to December 21 again, the electric room, the artists and the optimism and the adrenaline. Our first two days of rehearsal springboarded from this energy into every word of our tablework, every breath of our early movement exploration. And then, on the morning of December 23, we all woke up to the thing we had been dreading all along, the one email we didn’t want to get after the two years we’d spent waiting for this week: the PCR test results from our first day of rehearsal had come back and half our cast had tested positive for COVID-19. We quickly pivoted to a Zoom rehearsal that morning, and my mind started spinning through the Rolodex of ways I knew how to lead (or, at the very least, cope). Then, something flashed clearly across
my brain: that this process had started with someone asking me “What do you need?” and I was currently meeting the ultimate opportunity to pay this energy forward. Our Zoom rehearsal started with making space for us all to breathe, to talk, and to be together, no expectations, just people first; the care the institution had embraced me with was something I endeavored to pass on to the whole company that day. You could feel in the Zoom that even though we’d only known each other for three days, by the way we voiced our fears and sadness in those
