Interview: Mina Morita, Director of THE CHINESE LADY at Magic Theatre Pushes Boundaries to Tell Stories in New Ways

Director Mina Morita spoke with BroadwayWorld the day before Lloyd Suh's "The Chinese Lady" started performances at the Magic Theatre. Ms. Morita has a thriving career as a theatermaker, serving as Artistic Director of Potrero Hill's Crowded Fire Theater, which is devoted to the creation of challenging new work. Talking to her, it is clear that she is a very conceptual thinker, often weaving several complex ideas into a single sentence. Her passion for creating new forms of theater in the interest of fostering human connection is evident throughout the conversation. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

The press materials for "The Chinese Lady" say it is "inspired by the true story of the first Chinese woman to arrive on American soil... leavened with humor and insight." As its director, how would you describe the play?

I am going to steal Lloyd's words (the playwright): really it's a conjuring. Afong Moy is the first Chinese lady who was brought to America. In Lloyd's starting to write the play, he found a number of pieces, both advertising and White American ladies writing about their visit to this exhibition of Afong Moy, [but] we don't have any sense of what her experience was aside from through a very particular lens. So this conjuring is beyond that. It is to understand more deeply what her experience was, not only the year that she arrived, but at the age of 16, 17, 29, 44 and then 64 to today. We are exploring how the gaze has shifted over the course of time, in relationship to how American and Chinese relations shifted through the opium wars to today, and really understanding how a gaze is consumptive, and also can be about true understanding. We actually get to a point where we're in 2019, and she is facing us with this deep wisdom through all of that time and providing an invitation for true understanding.

Working on this production, you have the benefit of working with a living playwright, Lloyd Suh. Can you tell me about your working relationship with him?

It's great in that before we even got into rehearsal, he and I had been in conversation about the piece, what inspired it, and what his learnings have been with the other [four] productions. The Magic is where he began writing the piece in the first place so it has been an artistic home for him. [Artistic Director] Loretta [Greco] has basically created the space where he can write and follow his inspiration. He wrote the first three scenes or so here, and then hit a sort of writer's block in terms of finding out more information about her. That's when it truly became a conjuring, and about "How do we present ourselves, especially in terms of race? How does the gaze of others start to shape how we present, and then that actually shapes who we are ultimately?" Lloyd's been with us from first rehearsal virtually - you know online/video - and we've been in touch via email and on the phone throughout the process. He's actually flying in right now and he'll be with us for the next week so that's quite exciting. Previews is going to be deep-work time for us and him as well.

One of the challenges of staging a play at the Magic must be how to create a strong design in such an intimate, open playing area without any wing space or fly space. That said, I also realize that limitations can sometimes present opportunities, and I've certainly seen some beautifully designed work at the Magic. What's been your design approach for this show?

Because the play itself is an exhibition, it's perfect. We've created a platform in the center of all three audience seating areas with Afong Moy in the middle. She is on a playing space that feels like a beautiful cage of a kind, although it's open, she can walk off of it, she can leave at any time, but the sense of what keeps her there, both through purpose and mission and ultimately her invitation to us is very present. There's a beautiful circular Austrian curtain so that as we travel through time the curtain goes up and down, and she emerges in these different time periods. And she has a minder, Atung, who provides food and tea and other things in the exhibition of Chinese life amongst Chinese furniture. The originating point of the exhibition was that she was going to help Americans understand how Chinese furniture might fit into their life so that it could be sold to Americans. And so it becomes an exhibition/art installation. It's gorgeous! [Designer] Jackie Scott has created this beautiful platform and cage inspired by Chinese art and culture, but through a Western lens, deliberately.

What is it about "The Chinese Lady" that resonates with you most deeply, that made you think "I really need to direct this one!"?

Well, it's the story of an Asian-American woman, [which] I am. The idea of the performative nature of that - the orientalization, the sexualization, the consumption of and sort of the brushing off of, the power of an Asian-American woman because of what is perceived as diminutive stature, but is actually a deep resilience and strength on the part of that woman. That she had done things and prevailed in spite of. And in this time period when I think of migration and trying to understand across borders and oceans what is possible when we really seek to find wisdom in a cultural exchange instead of simply see each other in tropes and stereotypes or as a threat. There's something much more human that exists there.

Lloyd's writing is really brilliant. Every time I go through the piece in rehearsal, it's just more and more markedly sophisticated. It's hard to put an audience in a participatory space, both emotionally and intellectually, and then shift their understanding of what they're doing through the course of the play. Lloyd does so in a different and subtle way, and it's beautiful, it's absolutely stunning. I could not be more honored or imagine a more remarkable piece to be working on at this point.

"The Chinese Lady" is a Bay Area premiere so there isn't much of an established blueprint for you to follow. In general, do you prefer working on new plays as opposed to working on classics where there is a past history to learn from and react to?

I believe so. I'm the Artistic Director for Crowded Fire Theater, and our entire mission is to create a new canon that reflects the people outside our doors, and to look at representation in a very complex way. That is what new plays do for me. As much as I do love deep catharsis, I also think there are some truths we arrive at when we push against what a typical play might look like or be like. There is something in the friction between our usual sort of programming around story when it's pushed up against something that is unexpected or something that is not in our usual comfortable consumptive mode. As an artist it's really important to me to push against the status quo constantly because if we don't push for change of values and behaviors, the larger systems that can make us think of each other as objects and "other" prevail. As much as I respect platforms that are reimagining the classics, I think it's really important to lift up new voices who are trying to understand our current climate because the world is changing faster than I can even digest every morning!

Crowded Fire's website calls it a "vital home for fierce new plays." In practice, what does that mean to you?

I coined a term that a friend used: it's "whiskey theater." Like you cannot leave without needing to go to have a drink, or your choice of beverage, and have a very long conversation with the person you brought to the theater. It's visceral, it's dynamic, it's playing with form and it feels like a revolution is happening onstage in some subversive way. In the midst of whatever's beautiful, there's subversion. In the midst of whatever's grotesque, there is wisdom. It's the mixing of what is most shameful about what we are experiencing with the possibility of overcoming that.

What was it that led you to pursue theater as a career? It's certainly not taking the path of least resistance, it's rarely something our families are super supportive of - and, let's face it, even in the Bay Area, Asian-American female directors are still much more the exception than the rule.

Yeah, I think there's like four us - maybe? I actually did a TED Talk about this. In a nutshell, I come from a family of storytellers. My grandmother who is Russian was a deep oral storyteller, and my father was a graphic designer. My grandmother got her kids to the United States by working as a dressmaker and also on the black market as a trader. She was fierce and phenomenal, and got my mom over here. My mom was in Wisconsin working as a nurse and then made her way to New York and met my father, who was a graphic designer and a refugee who was on the lam from immigration, if you will. He taught for many years before starting his own practice as an artist and became the chairman of the Art Directors Club [of New York]. As I was growing up I could not imagine a more powerful way than through both visual and storytelling arts to shift how we think about things. And how we might then treat others and value our own stories, our own history. I think a lot about when there's any kind of fascist government it's often the artists and the journalists and the libraries that are razed to the ground because we have a power that goes deeper than numbers, that goes deep into the psyche of value, how we value ourselves and our strengths. Being a theater maker is incredibly important to me because even if you're changing the minds or values of three people in the audience for any given production, that's three people who are going to go out and change and affect another hundred people after that.

You previously worked at Berkeley Rep as an Artistic Associate, which is one of those job titles that sounds really cool, but also kind of vague. What did you actually do in that role?

It was great because Tony [Taccone] brought me on at the beginning of the Ground Floor program, which is a center for new play development. I was part of the team that originated the entire Ground Floor program so worked with both Meghan Pressman who's now at CTG [Managing Director of LA's Center Theatre Group], and Madeleine [Oldham] who's very much still at the Ground Floor to identify the structure and how we might create the support mechanisms for the Ground Floor in terms of staff and ambassadors, as well as how do we use the facilities to shape everyone's experience and what kinds of projects we were most interested in. The other large part was working with the artistic staff and Tony to be a part of season planning and then once the season arrived to be in the room to support the work that was being developed for the stage. That [included] putting together workshops and supporting Amy [Potozkin] with casting.

While at Berkeley Rep, you worked with Anna Deavere Smith on her play "On Grace." Any valuable lessons from working with her?

Yeah, I would say she's a genius person! It was a workshop at Grace Cathedral and artistically I learned by watching her process. I learned most as a producer: how to take a space that is not at all used to having, you know, a huge truss come in. We had to take all of the pews out, for a workshop mind you! She hadn't worked with anyone else onstage before so I found and hired an incredible Muslim man who did the call to prayer from the top of the cathedral balcony, we had Armando McClain who is now at Oregon Shakespeare Festival working as her partner, and Joshua Roman who is a brilliant cellist. Just figuring out what pieces might work best, who was she able to work with, putting the team together on a budget really that was made for a workshop but felt like a [full] production. Working for someone who is incredibly precise and methodical, but also for a two-week piece that felt like a year's worth of work within the two weeks.

One last question: It's pretty much a cliché for actors to say "but what I really want to do is direct." Any chance that what YOU really want to do is act?

Absolutely not!! [uproarious laughter] I think actors are genius, remarkable people. I just live too conceptually to be someone who can recreate the "in-the-moment-ness" that actors do on a daily basis. And besides that, I'm terrible at memorizing lines. I think I'd have stage fright like every two seconds!

Photo by Cheshire Isaacs

"The Chinese Lady" runs through Sunday, November 3rd at the Magic Theatre, Fort Mason Bldg. D, 3rd Floor, San Francisco, CA 94123. Tickets and further information available at www.MagicTheatre.org or by calling (415) 441-8822.