‘When my daughter thinks of Shakespeare, she’ll be able to imagine Asian American players’
The Winter’s Tale at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival
From Hazlitt:
I was nine or ten years old when I saw Twelfth Night—my first Shakespeare play—at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. By then I knew what a protagonist looked like (white, thin, conventionally attractive), and I knew I was supposed to care most about the talented and golden-haired young woman playing both Viola and her twin brother Sebastian. But the actor playing Olivia happened to be Asian—the first Asian actor I had ever seen onstage, and one of precious few I’d noticed anywhere. Regal and beautiful in her long black dress, I watched her sweep across the stage with a sense of wonder and expanding, exciting possibility I didn’t yet know how to name.
I like to refer to the OSF as “my hometown Shakespeare festival,” even though Ashland, Oregon is technically not my hometown, just nearit, and when I was growing up my family could almost never afford tickets. Last year, when Julie Cortez in the OSF communications office connected with me via the sorcery of Twitter, I was already planning a summer visit home and seized her offer of complimentary tickets with a flurry of grateful exclamation points. Then I wondered: Should I take my kids to the theatre, too? My then-five-year-old was too young, I decided, and would fall asleep an hour into the play. But my eight-year-old was only a year or two younger than I had been when I was introduced to Shakespeare; she’d been reading chapter books since kindergarten; she could probably infer a great deal, even if she missed a lot of the dialogue.
As I clicked through the season’s offerings online, I found myself reading with an eye toward which of the productions might be, if not kid-friendly, then at least kid-accessible. The image for The Winter’s Tale immediately caught my eye: Queen Hermione, half herself and half in marble, a statue blooming to life. This Hermione, I saw, was played by a Korean American actor named Amy Kim Waschke. The production, directed by Desdemona Chiang, was described as The Winter’s Tale “from an Asian and Asian American perspective,” and the cast featured Asian American artists in a majority of the lead roles.
