Shannon Tyo and Jinn S. Kim in “The Far Country,” at Atlantic Theater Company’s Linda Gross Theater through Jan. 1. Credit...Richard Termine for The New York Times.
The playwright of “The Far Country” is using a contemporary lens to show “the way in which memory becomes hereditary.”
The 47-year-old playwright Lloyd Suh is having a moment, with a handful of plays that reveal how history can exact an emotional toll across culture and time.
His latest, “The Far Country,” opens at Angel Island, the notorious checkpoint off the coast of San Francisco, and explores lives fractured by the Chinese Exclusion Act, a racist policy that severely restricted immigration of Chinese people and limited those in the United States from gaining citizenship.
“There’s certainly a range of activity now and a quantity of work and a variety of work that feels pretty fresh,” said David Henry Hwang, who became the first (and remains the only) Asian American playwright to win a Tony Award for best play, for “M. Butterfly” in 1988.
“There has been an increasing number of AAPI playwrights challenging what has come before,” Hwang added, referring to Asian American Pacific Islanders. “Asian actors have been largely employed by ‘The King and I’ and ‘Miss Saigon,’ which have Orientalist aspects, white supremacist aspects, and with ‘Miss Saigon’ is actually pretty racist.”