Playfest 7’s show at The Foundry in Cambridge last month told familiar stories of dealing with grief (and landlords), stumbling over artificial intelligence technology, and trying to get a point across the gap of generations within a family. And the all-Asian American Pacific Islander cast did so with humor, poignant dialogue and resonant performances.
Written by different Asian-American Pacific Islander playwrights, the eight short plays at the seventh annual Asian American Playwright Collective Playfest built a diverse set of worlds. These worlds contained, among other stories: an AI system dominating an executive with fragile masculinity, tenants holding their bad landlord hostage, and Shakespearean characters gaining consciousness of their scripted fates. Despite the constraints of the 15-to25-minute play format, the playwrights successfully brought to life complex characters exploring challenging themes through the lens of being Asian American. Many of the plays used humor, narratives that zoomed into hyper-specific characters and backdrops, and tight dialogues to get their messages across.
Playfest 7 created an accessible, fun entry-point to the work of Asian American Playwright Collective members. The AAPC is a group of Boston-based playwrights who have banded together to nurture, develop, and promote new work by Asian-American playwrights in the Boston area. With a writing team, cast, and crew of over 30 people, Playfest 7 was a testament to the richness of Asian-American Pacific Islander theater talent here. Unfortunately, an all-Asian cast and writing team can be rare in the U.S. theater world. Playfest 7 thus felt all the more exuberant, delightful, and vital. With almost every seat filled, the audience’s excitement was palpable in the intimate black box theater.
While all eight plays are of analytical importance in their own right, this review highlights the first four in order of performance as a testament to Playfest 7’s broad array of topics.
The play “Luz and Urduja,” written and directed by Michelle M. Aguillon, portrays a single mom getting her school-aged daughter ready for school. Between her unreliable ex and her daughter’s hesitance to catch the bus because of the racist bullying she encounters there, the mother gets increasingly frazzled while doing her best with the morning routine. Meanwhile, a mysterious figure enters the scene, infusing the play with a sense of intrigue and magical realism.
“Landlord Special,” written by Michael Lin and directed by Jenny S. Lee, is a comedic telling of a tenant who takes her bad landlord hostage in his own office. Another tenant comes to the rescue of the landlord. As she starts cutting away at the rope binding the landlord’s wrists, however, the instigator tenant urges her potential comrade to reflect: Does the landlord do repairs? What would it feel like for one’s salary to enrich oneself rather than the landlord? And, does the landlord even know his tenants’ names? A boisterous, humorous story belies many precisely aimed, politically conscious stabs at (bad) landlords.
“Letting Go,” written by Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro and directed by Jamie Lin, depicts a young woman taking care of her grandmother. Small misunderstandings ensue, despite the best of intentions. The young woman tries to mind her grandmother, chiding her for drinking boiling water and forgetting when to eat. But her grandmother solemnly proclaims, “I just want to be myself.” Questions of independence and interdependence in intergenerational families are opened and left poignantly unresolved by the end.
“Kith and Tell,” written by Hortense Gerardo and directed by Jamie Lin, is a funny and at times absurdist rendition of the classic boyfriend-meets-parents scenario. The girlfriend and boyfriend usually speak to each other in funky mash-ups of text talk (e.g. “omg lol #expectations), but go analog at Thanksgiving for the sake of the parents. The mom neighs and stamps her feet like a horse during the meal. The two generations are unable to see eye-to-eye. The parents see the boyfriend as corrupted and a victim to an ominous process that happened in the city, and the boyfriend sees the Midwestern family as unmodern animals. While told in absurdist ways, the story is highly relevant today.
Playfest 7 provided a crucial showcase of AAPI playwrights’ mastery of creating worlds full of wonder, intrigue, loss, surrealism, irreverence, and pain. The eight plays stood powerfully on their own, diving into issues of AAPI identity at times, but without needing to restrict themselves to digestible, recognizable Asian and Asian-American themes.
An annual tradition since 2018, Playfest is expected to
return next year, with announcements made at the AAPC website: https://aapcboston.wixsite.com/mysite.
