In a rehearsal room in Manchester, actor May Mack recalls an audition a few years ago.
“A casting director asked me if I could use an Asian accent,” said Mack, who was recently nominated for an Olivier Award for her performance as May with the Royal Shakespeare Company. my neighbor chinchilla. “I was blown away — Asia is such a huge continent. I said, ‘Are you speaking with a Cantonese accent or a Bangladeshi accent? ’ They said, ‘What is your mother tongue? ’ I said, ‘Birmingham.’”
She laughs it off now, but that’s exactly what her new project tackles.mike starred in ‘kimber lee’ untitled f*CKM*SS let’s playA fiercely satirical drama about the prejudices and casual stereotypes encountered by many British East and South East Asian (BSEA) actors. Winner of the inaugural Brentwood Playwright Prize International, the play will premiere at the Manchester International Festival this month (directed by Roy Alexander Weiss) before heading to London’s Young Vic Theater in September.
Lee’s play sped up a century of drama, starting in 1906, repeating the same scene over and over again: Handsome American soldiers sleep with a beautiful native woman, abandon her, come back to take their baby, and she kills herself.Although the title clearly echoes the 1989 musical Miss Saigonthe parody also references Puccini’s opera Madame Butterflythe rogers and hammerstein musical south pacific and TV series paste By the way.
The South Korean-born, New York-based playwright said she was watching the 2017 production of ” Miss Saigon. It’s clearly fueled by rage, but the weapons it wields are rich drama and frustrating irony.
“The show is powerful and poignant and funny,” says Mack, whose character Kim keeps finding herself caught in yet another narrative of exploitation and self-sacrifice. “This story is about King trying to break through a century of objectification, misogyny and racism — through those bamboo ceilings. But it uses humor as a vehicle to do so. It’s completely unapologetic.”
She added that although Miss Saigon Thrilling as it may be, the show’s scope is much wider. “We’re targeting stereotypes and saying, ‘Isn’t this ridiculous?'” Mack said. “It’s not about a single performance, or a single work, or an individual. We have to look at society and think, ‘Why do we live in a world where these narratives can exist?'”
Remarkably, the show’s premiere will coincide with the show’s revival. Miss Saigon At Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre, which prompted BSEA company New Earth Withdraw the show In the same venue as the Sheffield Theater publish its reasons for staging it. This situation again raises the question of whether the text in question should be resurrected, or should become history. For some, these issues are inherently unsolvable; for others, it’s important to stage and interrogate them. Mike’s point is subtle.
“I’m not interested in attacking Sheffield’s production Miss Saigon — I know a lot of people who are working on that,” she said. “I think the show itself has done permanent damage. I would never want someone to feel like they can’t do something. . . But the successful people must be the most affected people. What needs to be addressed, she suggests, are the systems and structures that produced these works: the new play’s repetitive structure is designed to show how stereotypes are perpetuated and embedded.
Mike, 30, grew up in Birmingham, the daughter of working-class parents from Hong Kong. She hadn’t considered working in theater until she met Yellow Earth (now New Earth). “I thought, ‘Wow, if they can do this, then maybe I can too.'” That’s why representation matters, she says: “You can’t be someone you can’t see.”
She rose to prominence on the fringe theater and drama stages and in 2022 received widespread acclaim for her fun, authentic portrayal of four-year-old Mei in “Xiao Mei”. chinchilla, Felim McDermott’s stage play based on the Studio Ghibli film. Her performance was inspired in part by Iris-Mia, the youngest daughter of a colleague on the show, who she describes as “powerful, sassy, very witty and fearless”.
But her early career often brought her up against stereotypes and assumptions: “The number of times I’ve been called to read about sex workers. I would definitely do a show where sex workers are complex and nuanced; Any question. But most of the time I’m just there to be a sexual object. That’s how people think about East Asian women too.
“I think things have changed a lot. (But) we still have a long way to go. Even at the Olivier Theatre, I was the first East Asian actress nominated for Best Actress in a Play.”
During the pandemic, Mac co-founded Rising Waves, a mentorship program designed to support BSEA artists, maintain diversity and stem the mid-career brain drain that occurs when artists are struggling to make ends meet. “That’s why we’re seeing such an exodus of working-class artists,” she said. “The program aims to pair emerging artists with established artists: the aim is to place these early career artists firmly into mid-career with the support of a practical skills-sharing program.”
Scarcity creates a sense of competition, she says: The program is designed to foster a sense of mutual support. This kind of positivity is very important to the Mac.That’s one of the qualities Untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play It’s very attractive to her. Over the course of the play, her character’s awareness grows and she begins to fight back against the narrative she’s caught in.
“Seeing a character who has lived through a century of oppression find her own resilience is truly empowering,” she said. “After a fourth of the same old problems, you’d forgive her for giving up. But she didn’t. In the East and Southeast Asian community, we often talk about intergenerational Trauma. But what we forget to talk about is the other side of the coin: intergenerational resilience.
“Art can reflect life, life can reflect art, and sometimes you have the opportunity to change the way life looks through art. You have to show something different.”
‘untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play’ will run at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theater from 24 June to 22 July, royal exchangethen at Young Vic, London, from 18 September to 4 November, youngvic.org
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