Chay Yew

Background

Chay Yew was born in 1965 in Singapore.

Education

Chay Yew attended Pepperdine University and received a Master of Fine Arts from Boston University.

Career

During the study at Boston University Chay served as playwright-in-residence at the Mu-Lan Theatre in London. In 1988, Yew returned to Singapore to work with the company TheatreWorks, which wanted to stage a play about AIDS. Yew offered to write the play, but As If He Hears, which focuses on the relationship between a gay social worker and a heterosexual businessman who contracts AIDS while visiting Bangkok, was rejected by government censors who objected to a gay leading character. At first, Yew abandoned the play, but he was later persuaded to rewrite it because its theme was so urgent at a time when AIDS cases were skyrocketing in Asia. Ironically, though the final revision deleted obvious gay references, it emphasized a gay subtext that Yew believes made the play even more subversive.

Yew began to receive major critical attention with his drama Porcelain, the first part of his “Whitelands” trilogy. The play is set in London, where Chinese Englishman John Lee is in prison awaiting trial for the “homo toilet sex murder” of his white working-class lover, William Hope. The play is constructed through flashbacks, TV interviews, and soliloquies.

A Language of Their Own, which opened in Los Angeles in 1995 and enjoyed a successful New York City run later that year, is the second part of the “White- lands” trilogy.

The final piece in the “Whitelands” trilogy, Half Lives, concerns an Asian American architect assigned the task of designing and supervising construction of the White-lands Mall. Though the architect is excited by this project, which symbolizes his dreams of assimilation into Southern California’s mainstream consumer lifestyle, his wife, a Singapore native, rejects this all American dream.

With Red, which confronts the issue of censorship, Yew returns to a more overtly political subject. He was inspired to write the play after the U.S. Congress, led by Newt Gingrich, attempted to censor funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, but the idea to set it during the purges of China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s came from actress Tsai Chin, whose opera singer father suffered the fate of so many artists who were punished during that era. Red centers on the efforts of romance writer Sonia Wong Pickford, known as “the Asian Danielle Steel,” to find out more about the ghost she discovers at the Beijing Opera during a visit there. The play earned significant attention.

Yew went to the Asian community in Los Angeles to collect stories for A Beautiful Country, which is a transliteration of the Chinese words for “America.” The title is ironic, for the play presents a country that is hardly beautiful. After discovering a magazine article from 1941 titled “How to Tell Your Friends from the Japs,” Yew decided to structure the play as a satirical fashion show, with a drag queen—Miss Visa Denied—as host. While fabulous models parade down the runway, the emcee reads from the text of the article so that the audience can tell whether the models are “Japs” or not. The play was performed at a Chinatown high school in Los Angeles.

Chay Yew's plays appear in numerous anthologies and have been produced by many theaters, including the Public Theater in New York City, Royal Court in London, Mark Taper Forum, Manhattan Theatre Club, Wilma Theatre, Long Wharf Theatre, Louisiana Jolla Playhouse, Intiman Theatre, Portland Center Stage, East West Players, Dad’s Garage, Singapore Repertory Theatre, Celebration Theatre, and TheatreWorks Singapore.

Yew was the director of the Mark Taper Forum"s Asian Theatre Workshop for ten years. As of 2007, he serves on the board of directors of Theatre Communications Group. He also serves on the Executive Board of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.

In July 2011, Chay became Artistic Director of Victory Gardens Theater.

Achievements

• Chay Yew is the recipient of the London Fringe Award for Best Playwright and Best Play, George and Elisabeth Marton Playwriting Award, GLAAD Media Award, APGF Community Visibility Award, Made in America Award, American Economic Association/Screen Actors Guild/American Federation TV and Radio Artists 2004 Diversity Honor, and Robert Chesley Award. He has also received grants from the Rockefeller Map, McKnight Foundation and the TCG/Pew National Residency Program.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Hyphenated American

    (In this collection of four new plays, Yew continues to ex...)

  • Porcelain and A Language of Their Own

    (Porcelain is an examination of a young man’s crime of pas...)

    1997

Membership

Chay Yew is a member of New Dramatists.