Premiere Season of The First Prime-Time Asian Sitcom Live Performance

INFO

Name	Premiere Season of The First Prime-Time Asian Sitcom
Year	2022
Playwright	Nahyeon Lee
Start Date	3 November 2022
End Date	27 November 2022
Organiser / Venue	Q Theatre
Director(s)	Ahilan Karunaharan
Producer(s)	Silo Theatre
Key Cast	Ariadne Baltazar, Dawn Cheong, Uhyoung Choi, Jehangir Homavazir, Jess Hong
Creative Team	Assistant Direction: Nahyeon Lee Lighting Design: Jennifer Lal Sound Design: Paige Pomana Costume Design: Natasha Ovely, Starving Artists Fund Set & Props Design: John Verryt Set & Props Assistant: Minsoh Choi Choreography: Olivia Tennet
Artform	Theatre
City	Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland

ABOUT

Written in 2019 and developed through two play reading initiatives — Proudly Asian Theatre’s Fresh Off The Page in November 2020 (with dramaturg Eleanor Bishop), and Tawata Production’s Breaking Ground at Kia Mau Festival in June 2021 — Nahyeon Lee’s The First Prime-Time Asian Sitcom received its world premiere as part of Silo Theatre’s 2022 season. The play marked two moments: Silo’s first mainstage presentation of a play by an Aotearoa East Asian creative; and the second presentation of an Aotearoa Asian play by a major theatre company in Tāmaki Makaurau in 2022, after Auckland Theatre Company’s season of Scenes from a Yellow Peril.

Set in the present day, The First Prime-Time Asian Sitcom is a fictionalised account of a production team bringing the first Asian-led sitcom to Aotearoa screens. The play is notable for addressing the rise in opportunities for Asian creatives through, as Asia Media Centre observed, “the intersection of trying to have the agency to define your own stories, and putting forth what you want to say.” In the same article, Lee elaborated:

Being a maker, you still exist in a series of systems and hegemonies. In Aotearoa we live in a predominantly Pākehā hegemony, so the Asian diaspora is constantly fighting an uphill battle. You aren’t the one defining your own values necessarily. Especially when you have to exist [and make a living] in an industry.

So this work is a raging war cry. It’s asking the hard questions about how we define ourselves in a system that doesn’t always have our best interests in mind, but has never predominantly had Asian diaspora interests in mind until now.

On the production’s execution, theatre critics were impressed by the techniques employed to convey the contradictions facing the characters. In her review for Ratworld, Jennifer Cheuk cited a “David Lynchian” horror “beneath the laughter and jingles,” a quality exploited through the sinister ‘show business’ setting and discordant sound and lighting design choices. These technical elements, “from macabre green flashes of light to the tinny karaoke track of ‘I Want It That Way’ ... [lend] a sense of disquietude to the entire performance,” wrote The Spinoff’s Shanti Mathias.

Jess Karamjeet for Theatre Scenes praised Ahilan Karunaharan’s “impeccable direction” and the “stellar performances” of the cast, singling out “the silent performance of Dawn Cheong after the ‘sitcom’ taping stops.” On Cheong’s role as the showrunner, Karamjeet remarked “I have never witnessed a performer command the stage like this. Empathising with the weight of this moment, as she reflects on her complicity in creating something so compromised, I find myself holding my breath.”

In his survey of the history of Asian theatre in Aotearoa, Nathan Joe noted Lee’s play premiered during a year that “was suitably abundant in Asian theatre,” adding that this surge in Asian-led mainstage theatre was exemplified by Lee’s play, which “focused on meta-theatrical examinations of race, unafraid of engaging in capital I identity politics” while commenting on “stereotypes we had grown up internalising, rather than recreating them at face value.”

The First Prime-Time Asian Sitcom opened on 4 November 2022 at Loft in Q Theatre, where it ran for three-and-a-half weeks.

Length 1 hour (no interval)