By Kai Curry
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
Lauren Yee. Photo by Beowulf Sheehan.
Only in hindsight did playwright Lauren Yee realize that she had written a “cycle of communism plays.”
Yee’s so-called “cycle” started with the play, “Cambodian Rock Band,” followed by “The Great Leap,” set in China in the 1980s.
Her newest release, “Mother Russia,” covers a portion of the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.
Each of Yee’s plays has been picked up for a run in Seattle, either at the Seattle Repertory Theatre (Seattle Rep) or ACT Theatre (A Contemporary Theatre) on Union Street.
Although Yee lives in New York City now, she told the Northwest Asian Weekly that her plays have a loyal following on the West Coast, where she is from.
“There’s a huge Asian American community on the West Coast,” she said. “There’s a shared sense of humor and understanding.”
Yee grew up in San Francisco and her parents were also born and raised there.
“My family has a long history with the city (of San Francisco),” she said.
Yee believes her experience might not have been the same as many Asian Americans, because in her neighborhood, Asians were in the majority. Many of her classmates were Asian American, specifically Chinese American, she said.
But like most Asians in the U.S., Yee never saw this reflected in stories.
“It was a mind trip,” she said. “The world I lived in did not match the one on TV or in theater, but I knew I wanted to be a writer.”
Early on, Yee entered a short play contest and was selected. Showing up to the rehearsal, being part of the interplay around the table between writer, director, and actors, Yee thought to herself, “Oh, I like this.”
Yee didn’t have a lot of financial resources, so she decided that she would make her own theater program.
“I formed a theatre called Youth for Asian Theater. It was me rounding up all my friends, who weren’t necessarily actors or theater people,” Yee recalled. “We acted, directed, starred in, and produced an evening of original plays every summer for four years.”
Yee called this her training ground. She went on to major in theater in college at Yale and University of California San Diego.
While Yee’s “The Great Leap” played in Seattle in 2018, and “Cambodian Rock Band” followed in 2023, she has been working on “Mother Russia” since 2017.
At the time, Yee was invited through Seattle Rep to attend the Colorado New Play Festival.
“Initially, we were supposed to workshop ‘The Great Leap,’ which they were going to produce the following year,” Yee recalled. “I said, ‘I think it would be a great use of the time if I worked on something new, something I haven’t written yet.’”
Yee told the Northwest Asian Weekly that she draws inspiration for her stories from subjects and worlds that interest her and that she wants to understand better. She arrived in Colorado with “a bunch of pages about two young men working a surveillance operation in Russia and it exploded from there. Over the course of that week, I came up with the bones of what would become ‘Mother Russia.’”
“Mother Russia” takes place in 1992. The Berlin Wall has fallen, and the Soviet Union has broken up. To Yee, Russia was “at this cusp of western free speech, democracy, ads, western brands, a huge change” and in the play, “you have these two dudes who are like, ‘What do we do now?’”
The audience watches Evgeny and Dmitri (to be played by Billy Finn and Jesse Calixto) try to wrap their heads around new-to-them things that may be familiar to those in the U.S., Yee said, such as McDonald’s, “choosing what kind of clothes you want to wear, investments, American consumerism, American capitalism.”
In this new world, they have to decide, “What is good for us? What is bad for us?” Yee felt that the timing of the release of the play—which was originally delayed, due to the pandemic and then Yee feeling it would be inappropriate to run the play, as Russia was invading Ukraine—could not be more appropriate.
“In 2017, I did not envision the future that we are in now,” Yee said. “We are today in unprecedented times … that are uncertain, scary. We don’t know what’s going to happen. I cannot tell you what Seattle is going to look like in a year.”
In the play, there is a personification of Mother Russia, played by Julie Briskman, that acts as a kind of god, “the soul of Russia,” Yee said, “looking over the mere mortals and commenting, ‘I’ve been around for hundreds of years. I will be around after you all are gone. What is going on here?’”—which could also apply to the U.S. and the world now.
The play has elements of humor and seriousness, something that Yee feels is another habit of her writing.
“My work always marries…the absurdity alongside the drama,” Yee said. “‘Mother Russia’ is funny in the way that political farce is funny, that human foibles are funny. It’s ordinary people living in extraordinary times. It breaks your heart and is hilarious and relatable and absurd.”
“Mother Russia” will run at Seattle Rep from March 6 to 29. For more information, visit Seattle Rep’s website.
Kai can be reached at newstips@nwasianweekly.com.
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