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Happy New Year, in 12 Minutes or Less
Ben's a featured character in "Almost Famous," written and directed by Cameron Crowe. (A true story written and directed by Crowe - his first since writing and directing Tom Cruise in "Jerry Maguire.") -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The room was as bright as any Chinese restaurant. In the corridors, children played and shouted, while, in this main room, friends spotted and chatted with each other. But this was no restaurant. This was a theater�at least for this one evening in the Japantown neighborhood of San Francisco, in the midst of the celebration of the new year, 4698. We were gathered here, in this room at the Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California, because we were summoned. What happened was, the Asian American Theater Company put out a call, just a few weeks before the event, for 12-minute plays�to be submitted within 12 days. The inspiration? Buddha, of course. Or, as I could swear I heard in one of the plays: Buddha-bing! In its call to writers, the AATC reminded: "The Lord Buddha summoned all the animals to come to him before he departed from Earth. Only twelve animals came to bid him farewell. As a reward, he named a year after each one in the order that it arrived." Inspired by Buddha's summons, the theater company, which was founded in 1973 as a playwrights' workshop, invited writers to come up with something about Chinese New Year--anything they wanted, in fact, as long as they met the deadline: "Before the dragon gets here." And so, one week into the Lunar new year observance, five or six dozen of us gathered to hear eight (a lucky number) readings. I was there as an observer, there to soak in some New Year spirit, to support the AATC, and, of course, to watch for material to steal for my stint as co-anchor of the TV broadcast of the Chinese New Year Parade the following weekend. In other words, I wasn't taking notes for a story. But I couldn't help noting a theme: The young have taken over. Yes, there were a few dinosaurs, like Charlie Chin, the wonderful musician/storyteller, and Kelvin Han Yee, an actor who's added directing to his dossier in recent months, and AATC director Pamela Wu, who also had her directing hat on this evening. And in the audience was Marc Hayashi, one of the company's previous directors, back in the Bay Area after five years in Minnesota. Chin, a transplant from New York, where he once played guitar in the rock band, Cat Mother & His All-Night Newsboys, spun a jazzy piece about a group of buddies who had a Chinese New Year's Eve ritual of getting together and drinking�and, one year, learning all about having to pay one's debts, however bloody, by year's end. Charlie's one-man performance was a standout, in more ways than one. Before and after him came Generation Next, pairs and groups of fresh-faced kids, talking the hip-hop talk, questioning the customs of the old-timers, fighting through the dysfunctions of their families, trashing each other�verbally and otherwise. In The Urn by Duy Nguyen, a departed father whines through the urn that entombs him and that keeps him, in death, at the center of a crazed Vietnamese family whose grandma takes the form of an inflatable snake. I guess you had to be there. And speaking of the snake, next year's honored star of the Chinese Zodiac has a face-to-face, such as it is, with the Dragon, unwinding a reel of complaints about how the dragon is the big star of the Lunar calendar, and how he, the snake, gets no respect. "Nobody likes me," he kvetches. The Dragon tries to chill him out. "Think of all the creatures who missed that one chance to sit in eternal glory," he says. The snake just hisses. In the end, however, there were questions raised and answered; lessons taught and learned; advice spurned and dispensed: "Feel good now," the ghost of a father tells his son in "Line Unbroken" by Michael Golamco. "The past is memories; the future may never come." But if these brisk, funny, probing, loving, in-your-face pieces are any indication, and if we can hear more from the likes of Nguyen, Golamco, Don Chao, Gordon CC Liao, Dominic Mah, Michelle Motoyoshi, and Tim Yamamura, then the future is already here. --------------------------------- Click to Ben Fong-Torres Articles
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