In Silicon Valley, every Chinese mother is a version of Amy Chua, the tiger mother who forbade her children from sleepovers and considered theater an undisciplined, unworthy extracurricular. So at age sixteen I told my parents I was putting in extra hours after school at the Science Olympiad in order to watch my first play, “Dark of the Moon” by Howard Richardson and William Berney. I suppose it was the play’s sinister overtones, the story of tragic, forbidden love between a human and a witch, but theater will always be a bit like witchcraft to me – dark, mysterious, off limits and therefore utterly fascinating.
So last night when Asia Society hosted a panel discussion with four prominent playwrights, each occupying four different corners of the Chinese thespian scene (Taiwan, China, Hong Kong and Chinese American), I wondered, how did they make a career in the cash-strapped theater industry and with a tiger mother breathing down their necks?
Well, they answered that question quite quickly.
“Like Robert Anderson said, you can make a killing in the theater but you can’t make a living,” exclaimed David Henry Hwang, acknowledging the 800-pound gorilla at the panel: “How do you make a living in your respective country’s markets?”
The short answer was fairly surprising: You can’t.
I imagined my mother at the panel raising a fist and saying, “Amen.”
For the four playwrights, teaching is the primary source of funding, as well as some commercial work.
“I cannot survive just writing plays,” said Wei-Jan Chi who is also a professor at Taiwan University. “Twenty years ago, I wrote a play for a friend. He paid me 200,000 New Taiwan Dollars (~USD $6,740.82 today). Twenty years later, he still paid me the same thing.”
“Beijing is totally different,” said Meng Jinghui who works mostly as a director in Beijing. “If you can write a movie or a television drama, you can make a lot of money. Many of my young friends will write a series of television dramas and write one stage drama.”
Candace Chong said she experimented with various models, first producing as many plays as she could, then slowing down, opting for higher-priced plays of higher quality. She is still experimenting but in the mean time, is also teaching to supplement her income.
Because funding is so often a struggle, these playwrights note that the key dilemma in their industry is producing meaningful work that is also commercially successful.
Chong noticed a shift in Hong Kong’s theater scene since their 1997 handover to China. Eager to tap China’s large and lucrative market, playwrights and those in the theater industry tend to self-censor in order to produce viable work.
“Theater is a shotgun marriage between art and commerce,” noted Hwang. But unlike in the past, when producing good work came first and commerce second, “there has been a paradigm shift” with commerce first and quality second.
Still, Meng who has always been somewhat of a rebel, says optimistically and with a sly grin that his next project is going to be very conceptual, abstract, something the audiences just won’t get.
It’s been over a decade since I secretly watched my first play, glancing over my shoulder to see if my mother had found me out. Since then I’ve been a fairly decent theater-goer but like the last play I watched and loved, a small London production of Albert Camus’ lesser known work, “Cross Purpose,” it always comes back to the incomprehensible for me. Like the love between a human and a witch, of all things. If Meng’s next play is anything like that, he has a point. Sometimes we find most meaning in the absurd.