Asian American play explores the afterlife
By Yvonne Lim Wilson | October 6, 2008
In 410 [GONE], a play by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, a sister journeys to the Chinese Land of the Dead to search for her missing brother, encountering a frenetic, arcade landscape where The Goddess of Mercy and The Monkey King reign, and Dance Dance Revolution is the secret to unforgetting. Juxtaposing the closet where the Asian American teen killed himself with his ancestral home beneath a mountain in eastern China, the play follows the siblings as the sister searches for meaning inside suicide, and her brother tries to remember who he is while navigating the hijinks of the mythical beings.
Don’t miss 410 [GONE]: October 10, 15, 16 at 8 pm. October 12 at 2 pm at the Oskar Brockett Theatre in the Winship Theatre Building at UT Austin. Also, free dress rehearsal performance Oct. 9, 8 p.m. For more information, visit 410[GONE] at UT Fine Arts.
Tell me about 410 [GONE] … what does the title refer to?
410 [GONE] is the Internet error code you get when something you are searching for, a Web site that used to exist at a given location, has been deliberately removed, is gone forever, and there is no forwarding address. In the play, the sister is looking all over the Internet/closet/etc. for her missing brother, whom she feels has seemingly vanished from her life without a trace.
What was your inspiration for this play?
My younger brother hung himself when he was 17 and I was 21 (the two main characters in the play are called 17 and 21). This was in 2004. I took this original situation and constructed a fantasy journey around that. Having spent half my life in East Asia and half my life in the United States, with Taiwanese Daoist grandparents on one side and Boston-Irish Catholic grandparents on the other, I became very interested in the question of the soul, what (could) happen to the soul of a transnational / immigrant / mixed race person, and from that came the story of the play. Though I myself am hapa/multiracial and somewhat transnational, I chose to make the characters Chinese-American, to simplify things.
What was your intention in mixing traditional Chinese elements with more modern things, like Dance Dance Revolution?
One of the primary concerns in my writing is the collision of the ancient and modern, the mythic and the mundane. On one level, it is a useful dramatic technique because it can be funny; on another, I feel that in my generation that has grown up on the internet, everything has become flattened, equal – something that is 3,000 years old is given equal weight/Internet presence as something that might have only come into existence three months ago.
What will the play look like in terms of set design, costumes, etc.?
Seeing the work of the designers has been one of my greatest joys and sources of excitement during this process; they are all so talented. In the production, the land of the living is a closet that hovers over the land of the dead, which contains a bathtub and a DDR console. The costumes draw from both ancient (Peking Opera) and modern (anime/harajuku/avatar) sources. Lighting, sound, and video design also echo this collision of ancient and modern.
Do you have a favorite scene or line?
My favorite scene is the last scene, but I don't think I should say what happens, because it takes the journey of the play to throw it into focus.
What message do you hope viewers will get from 410[Gone]?
My goal in writing is never one message, but open-endedness. I hope I have written the play such that different audience members connect to different characters for different reasons, so that there is not one dominant moral or message, but rather, that instead of leaving with a message, we leave more awakened, more present, with more questions about life, living, existence, than we had before we stepped into the theatre.
Tell us about yourself, your background.
I was made in Taiwan, born in Philadelphia, to a Taiwanese mother and a Boston-Irish father, raised in Northern Virginia until I was 9, at which point my father joined the United States Foreign Service, and we moved to Okinawa for 2 years, Taipei for 2 years, and Beijing for five years (where I attended the International School of Beijing). Following that I attended Brown University in Rhode Island, where I studied sociology, and the Dell'Arte School of Physical Theatre in Northern California, where I studied ensemble theatre creation. And from there I moved to Austin to attend the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin. My parents are at present stationed in Chengdu, China, in Sichuan province, so I spend a couple months a year out there with them, too.
What other works have you produced?
My first play ever was produced at Brown, and called THE GOLDEN LOTUS, and was about footbinding and standards of beauty among women in old China. I am also working on a horror screenplay called WAR BABY that takes place in Okinawa, Japan, a novel in stories titled THE SKY HAS FALLEN about the lives and afterlives of a transnational multiracial American family, and several other plays that will go up in Austin in the spring.
Are there certain themes you’re interested in exploring with your work?
I have a lot of interests. Spending a lot of time growing up in Asia, going to Taiwan every Chinese New Year, seeing candy left out on bridges and burning money for the dead, has created in me a lifelong interest in the relationship between the living and the dead, and the dramatic action that can come out of the collisions of different attitudes towards life/after-life. Moving through so many worlds all the time, both on a local and international level has impacted how I construct narrative and multiple worlds/dimensions. I continue to be interested in the souls/afterlives of immigrants. Ultimately though, I think I am mostly just interested in what I don’t already know, and so much of the fun of writing is researching and colliding what I already know with the vastness of what I don’t know, and seeing what emerges from that, in the form of character, and language, and narrative.
What's next?
I have two more plays going up at UT in the spring. I graduate from Michener in May, and then after that, I think the real education will begin. My current favorite quote is from the photographer Ray K Metzker, who said that “A person who doesn't grow hasn’t met enough resistance...Think of graduate school as preparation to climb a mountain.” When I graduate, I plan to work on my novel-in-stories, plays, and screenplays as my unpaid fulltime job, and then get whatever part-time work I can to pay my bills. I am presently planning to move to New York, in part so that I can be around more writers of color, and have access to more Asian American theatre artists.
