The First Prime-Time Asian Sitcom Play

INFO

Name	The First Prime Time Asian Sitcom
Year	2022
Playwright	Nahyeon Lee
Type of Text	Play
Artform	Theatre

ABOUT

The First Prime-Time Asian Sitcom is the debut play by Nahyeon Lee, a Korean New Zealand filmmaker and theatremaker based in Tāmaki Makaurau.

A fictionalised account of a production team bringing the first Asian-led sitcom to Aotearoa screens, Lee wrote the play in 2019 and developed it through two play readings, before it was programmed by Silo Theatre. On the process, Lee felt it was necessary “to revise it and revisit the local politics of how I felt about the industry shifting. I feel like now the door is open and even the reflection of this play being programmed is itself a meta-like indication of how far we’ve moved forward.”

Publicised as a “genre-messing black comedy” that “disarm[s] audiences to consider stereotypes, commodity culture — and what the hell ‘Pan Asian representation’ really means,” Lee’s play is divided into three acts. The first act depicts the taping of the sitcom’s pilot episode. Centred on four Asian flatmates in a Friends-style comedy scenario, the actors perform the episode in front of a live studio audience (the play’s actual audience members) while being monitored off-stage by the showrunner.

In the aftermath, the second act turns to a panel discussion featuring the showrunner alongside industry personalities — now played by the sitcom’s cast members — who debate the topic of Asian representation and the sitcom’s perceived breakthrough for Asian creatives. The third act shifts to the writers’ room, where the showrunner and her team question their place in “trying to negotiate a path between authenticity and being palatable to white audiences.”

Lee has described writing the play “in a fit of fury” and with an awareness “that our traumas can be commodified into these consumable pieces.”

I felt myself existing in a ridiculous paradox, where Asianness was defined by others, both valued and feared. We are closer than ever in spaces of diversity, but it seems these are the only spaces I have been allowed into. I want this play to push the conversation about what it means to be in the diaspora in Aotearoa, and interrogate who holds the power in the creation of representation.

Ratworld’s Jennifer Cheuk lauded the play for investigating “the paradox of representation, diversity and creative work with sharp wit and terrifying truth.” Writing for Theatre Scenes, Jess Karamjeet concluded it was “an exceptional piece of art that demands reflection more than a blow-by-blow ‘review’,” while for The Spinoff, Shanti Mathias acknowledged it represented “perhaps the most authentic experience of Asianness in Aotearoa: questioning how to exist in systems that both limit your identity and offer new ways to shape and share that identity.”

During the sitcom’s live taping, a laugh track and other broadcast television conventions emphasise the medium’s homogeneity — and with it, Lee says, the pressure “to commodify your race so you can get some viewers onto screen.” The laugh track unsettles the audience so they, as Jess Karamjeet observed, “don’t always laugh on cue at the same jokes as the canned laughter.” The effect, according to Nathan Joe’s programme notes, draws attention to tropes and stereotypes that “provide a streamlined version of the ‘Asian experience’ at the expense of cultural nuance.”

In the play’s final moments, Lee references the show business satire Singin’ in the Rain with a cast rendition of ‘Make ‘Em Laugh’ – a cathartic musical number alongside the destruction of the set that expresses the characters’ rage and the impossibility of their situation.

On the creation of the play and the work of her Asian peers, in a 2022 interview Lee remarked that:

I’m really fascinated by systems and how the process will actually change the creative nature of the work. We all go into art because we want to express something deep within ourselves, but what happens when that’s not on your own terms all the time, or what happens when you have to face roadblocks?

You have to constantly compromise just so it can stay alive. I feel like I’m choosing between, this can exist, but I have to compromise along the way; and how much am I willing to lose for it to even exist? I feel like it’s a matter of survival. How much are you willing to compromise to survive?