Year Zero is in previews now and opens Monday 21; Chad Deity starts previews September 25.
MISTER ZERO Year Zero’s Joyee Lin makes the right call.
Photo: Lola Farragut
“The boss decides that since they’re both people of color, the best role for them to play would be terrorists.”
Playwright Kristoffer Diaz is describing the plot of The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, his new play about small-time professional wrestlers. “I think [pro wrestling is] a really wonderful art form. But it does tend to play to the lowest common denominator, which means it can be really racist and sexist and homophobic,” he says. “It plays to stereotypes in a really huge way.” That kind of pigeonholing is precisely what Ignition, the new Victory Gardens initiative that’s bringing Chad Deity to the stage, is meant to combat.
Victory Gardens has an ensemble of playwrights, and the company commits itself to devoting at least half of each season to their work. But it also recognizes the need to develop new voices (and, one would hope, new audiences). To that end, associate artistic director Sandy Shinner and literary manager Aaron Carter turned the key on Ignition, courting submissions from playwrights of color under 40 who’d yet to be produced by a major regional theater.
“I’ve actually never had a full production anywhere,” says Diaz, a Brooklyn-based writer. “I’ve done some stuff back in New York with the Lark Play Development Center and the Hip-Hop Theater Festival. As a playwright you do a lot of workshops and a lot of developmental things before you actually get a full production.” In Chicago this year, Diaz will get two; American Theater Company has slated his Welcome to Arroyo’s for April.
Victory Gardens garnered 120 submissions, which it whittled down to six plays that received readings in the initial Ignition fest last August. The theater had committed to producing one of those six; it ended up choosing two, Chad Deity and Michael Golamco’s Year Zero, a drama about Cambodian-American teens learning their family history.
“Their mother was a survivor of the Cambodian genocide, but neither of them has heard the mother’s stories,” says Golamco from his Los Angeles home. “It’s about personal histories. Like what happened with the Khmer Rouge, where they were trying to destroy the previous culture and start from a year zero—you can’t really do that. You have to embrace whatever your past was, recognize it and live with it.
“I’m really approaching this from an outsider’s perspective. It frees you a little, because you aren’t as beholden to certain things,” says Golamco, who’s of Filipino and Chinese descent. “But at the same time you’re more beholden, because you want to get things right, to be authentic.”
Questions of identity and authenticity seem appropriate for a festival geared toward writers of color. Yet Year Zero isn’t about Golamco’s ethnicity, even if it’s being produced in part because of it—this time, at least. Both playwrights acknowledge that outreach programs like Ignition can feel like double-edged swords, though they say Victory Gardens has handled the program exceptionally well.
“I’ve been in other theaters where I’ve had playwrights who’ve been workshopped come out and tell me, They’re not going to produce you; they’ve never produced anybody out of this program before,” says Diaz. “Which is, you know, a little sobering.
“I think by getting these kinds of productions that Victory Gardens is investing in, we’re going to get to the point where [other] big theaters will stand up and take notice,” he continues. “Not just try to fit us into their ‘person of color slot’ but really fit us into their seasons. The challenge is to get to that point.”
Golamco puts it more bluntly: “It’s kind of an evolve-or-die situation.”
Victory Gardens has an ensemble of playwrights, and the company commits itself to devoting at least half of each season to their work. But it also recognizes the need to develop new voices (and, one would hope, new audiences). To that end, associate artistic director Sandy Shinner and literary manager Aaron Carter turned the key on Ignition, courting submissions from playwrights of color under 40 who’d yet to be produced by a major regional theater.
“I’ve actually never had a full production anywhere,” says Diaz, a Brooklyn-based writer. “I’ve done some stuff back in New York with the Lark Play Development Center and the Hip-Hop Theater Festival. As a playwright you do a lot of workshops and a lot of developmental things before you actually get a full production.” In Chicago this year, Diaz will get two; American Theater Company has slated his Welcome to Arroyo’s for April.
Victory Gardens garnered 120 submissions, which it whittled down to six plays that received readings in the initial Ignition fest last August. The theater had committed to producing one of those six; it ended up choosing two, Chad Deity and Michael Golamco’s Year Zero, a drama about Cambodian-American teens learning their family history.
“Their mother was a survivor of the Cambodian genocide, but neither of them has heard the mother’s stories,” says Golamco from his Los Angeles home. “It’s about personal histories. Like what happened with the Khmer Rouge, where they were trying to destroy the previous culture and start from a year zero—you can’t really do that. You have to embrace whatever your past was, recognize it and live with it.
“I’m really approaching this from an outsider’s perspective. It frees you a little, because you aren’t as beholden to certain things,” says Golamco, who’s of Filipino and Chinese descent. “But at the same time you’re more beholden, because you want to get things right, to be authentic.”
Questions of identity and authenticity seem appropriate for a festival geared toward writers of color. Yet Year Zero isn’t about Golamco’s ethnicity, even if it’s being produced in part because of it—this time, at least. Both playwrights acknowledge that outreach programs like Ignition can feel like double-edged swords, though they say Victory Gardens has handled the program exceptionally well.
“I’ve been in other theaters where I’ve had playwrights who’ve been workshopped come out and tell me, They’re not going to produce you; they’ve never produced anybody out of this program before,” says Diaz. “Which is, you know, a little sobering.
“I think by getting these kinds of productions that Victory Gardens is investing in, we’re going to get to the point where [other] big theaters will stand up and take notice,” he continues. “Not just try to fit us into their ‘person of color slot’ but really fit us into their seasons. The challenge is to get to that point.”
Golamco puts it more bluntly: “It’s kind of an evolve-or-die situation.”
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