Kit Yan and Melissa Li performed songs from their pop-rock musical “Interstate” Feb. 5 at the Pao Arts Center. The two are developing a work on Boston’s Chinatown as a collaboration between Company One Theatre and the Pao Arts Center. (Image courtesy of Ling-Mei Wong.)
A multigenerational multicultural group of community citizens gathered Feb. 5 at the Pao Arts Center. Some arrived hungry, but after good food, music and company, many left with their tummies and hearts full.
They gathered to celebrate playwrights Kit Yan and Melissa Li, PlayLab Pao fellows of a collaboration between Company One Theatre (C1) and the Pao Arts Center. The two-year community-centered art-making initiative will “create a new theatrical work with and for Chinatown residents to uplift the narratives and concerns of the Chinatown community.” Yan and Li have strong ties to Boston’s Chinatown. They are currently based in New York; Li was raised in Boston, while Yan grew up in Hawaii.
The pair were introduced by C1’s director of new work Ilana Brownstein and Pao Arts Center’s director Cynthia Woo. Yan and Li performed musical selections from their award-winning pop-rock musical “Interstate.”
Audience members reflected in small groups on individual connections to Boston’s Chinatown, and then shared ideas about creating a collective narrative. Yan and Li emphasized the creative process was iterative and collaborative. The content and form the theatrical work might take would be determined over the next year, such as being musical theater or play with music, along with languages it would be presented in.
In the airy, aesthetically lovely Pao Arts Center with about 60 other community members, I wondered how many knew we sat on a historically significant piece of land. In the 1960s, hundreds of Chinatown residents were displaced to make way for a highway. Did they know without activists leading the charge in reclaiming this land, negotiating with policymakers and developers, demanding affordable housing and advocating for community spaces, Chinatown might have lost important parts of its history, culture and soul?
Information about Chinatown history will be critical to project success, along with local presence. I was reassured to learn a community producer was built into the project, led by Christina Chan, local playwright and cofounder of the Asian American Playwright Collective.
Chan said she will help Li and Yan connect with Boston’s Chinatown, finding news articles about its struggles, strength and survival, and sharing social connections. She will organize face-to-face talks with residents and community leaders, and host town hall meetings so the fellows can hear Chinatown stories. The three will also brainstorm ideas about the play. Their creative collaboration will serve the project well, as it offers the lens of individuals with lived experience across six decades of Boston’s Chinatown.
