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I conducted this interview with Philip W. Chung, co-artistic director of Lodestone Theatre Ensemble, as part of my coverage of the first National Asian American Theater Festival (NAATF). Lodestone�s entry in the festival is a collaboration with three other groups � 18 Mighty Mountain Warriors, Cold Tofu, and OPM � entitled TeleMongol. It was originally performed in Los Angeles in the fall of 2007. The feature article on NAATF that I wrote for TheaterMania can be viewed by clicking here. This is an expanded version of our interview, containing a lot of stuff that wasn�t able to make it into the final draft of the article. The interview was conducted June 1, 2007.
DAN BACALZO: You�re credited with instigating the TeleMongol collaboration. How did it come about?
PHILIP W. CHUNG: The season before last, Lodestone did a number of plays which were all sort of serious dramas, and I thought it was time to do a comedy. It�s hard to find really good comedies, so I thought why don�t we develop one? I knew the other three groups, which are either sketch or improv focused, and I thought it would be interesting to develop a show together.
DB: What do you feel distinguishes the groups from each other?
PC: 18 Mighty Mountain Warriors deal with more political issues. Cold Tofu is more improv, more community based. And OPM is more kind of outrageous sketch comedy. Lodestone is the theater company � we�re the one group that�s not specifically about comedy. But I think even though our four groups are very different, we all have a similar sensibility. We�re all young, Asian American and have a kind of edgier feel. We have the same influences and find the same things funny. When you start a collaboration like this between four groups, you never know how it�s going to turn out, even if you already know and like each other. I thought we came up with a show that�s pretty interesting and reflects the identity of all the groups.
DB: How is it structured?
PC: The one thing that I emphasized was that I didn�t want to just do a series of sketches. I wanted to find some unified concept for all the smaller scenes we would be doing. We�re setting it at a fictional Asian American television network, where the sketches are the various programming on it.
DB: Tell me a little bit about the actual collaborative process. Did each group bring in stuff separately, or was there cross-writing between groups?
PC: It was both. Writers from each group would meet regularly and brainstorm ideas together, and then people would go off and write either by themselves or in partnership with someone else, bring it back in, and then we�d all go over it. It was a nine month process, putting together the script, and I think it turned out pretty well.
DB: Do you feel it makes a political statement?
PC: It�s not as political as 18 Mighty Mountain Warriors usual stuff. It�s more a comment on Asian American pop culture or lack thereof. That�s political too, as it deals with stereotypes and specific images. We also have a news segment in the show that tries to be as up to date as we can get it. So depending on what we have for that, it could be more or less political. It depends on what�s happening at the time.
DB: So that part is not something you plan out far in advance?
PC: When we did the show back in the fall, we would actually have new sequences based on what happened that week.
DB: What kind of humor is in the show?
PC: It�s certainly not for everybody. When the L.A. Times came, and gave us a really nice review, they compared it to Borat. Some people were like, �Can we bring the kids?� and I told them, �Uh, let me tell you what�s in it and you can decide.� I don�t want to make it sound like its some family-friendly thing. The humor is very much adult.
DB: Is there a moment in this collaborative process that stands out for you?
PC: It was one thing just to get through it. We�re all still friends, and we didn�t end up killing each other. For me, since I wanted to do a comedy, the main thing was on opening night when we had a theater full of people who were all laughing. Comedy�s really hard to do, and you�re not sure if it�s always going to work. But if people laugh, it�s funny and if they don�t it�s not. On one level, it�s that simple. Another key thing is that in the show, we skewer a number of Asian American pop culture figures, and one of them is George Takei, who played Sulu on Star Trek. Early in the run, George, who is a great supporter of all four of the companies, came to see the show. And we were like, �Oh, we�re making fun of him. What�s he going to think?� And he laughed. He has a very distinct voice, and you can hear him laughing the loudest when we portray him onstage. Afterwards, he talked about how great it was and he referred a lot of people to the show.
DB: I�m assuming the sketch wasn�t done in a mean-spirited way.
PC: I don�t think so. There are some people who are skewered in a mean-spirited way, but they deserve it. George wasn�t one of them.
DB: TeleMongol will soon be playing the Asian American Theater Festival in New York. Why do you think a festival like this is needed, and why now?
PC: To take the last part first, the one thing that really surprised me in a pleasant way at the Asian American Theater conference last year was sheer numbers -- the number of people who were involved, and the number of companies, some of which I�d known and new ones I�d never heard of. There was this critical mass. Obviously, we�re doing work all over the place. When I first started my career 10 years ago, I pretty much knew who everyone was, but now there's so many new groups and shows popping up all over the place that I can't keep track anymore. It�s great that there�s going to be an event that brings everyone together.
DB: What are you looking forward to the most about performing in New York?
PC: Everyone thinks of New York as a theater town. I think L.A., where we�re from, has a lot of great theater, too, but there�s something about New York -- the vibrancy of live theater there. And then with the festival, there�s also the vibrancy of performing with other Asian American artists and seeing other Asian American artists perform that has a magic quality.
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