Interview: Min Kahng of the 20TH ANNIVERSARY NEW WORKS FESTIVAL at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley Uses Absurdity to Explore Humanity

Hard to believe, but TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s New Works Festival is now 20 years old. This seminal festival has served as incubator for countless works that have gone on to productions across the country, including Broadway’s Tony Award-winning Best Musical Memphis and the 2018 Obie Award winner for Best New American Play, Rajiv Joseph’s Describe The Night. In previous years, the festival has given audiences their first looks at new works by such eminent writers as Andrew Lippa, Wendy Wasserstein, Stephen Schwartz, Marsha Norman, Christopher Chen, Duncan Sheik, Rachel Sheinkin, Rogelio Martinez, Kimber Lee, Joe DiPietro and Rehana Lew Mirza, just for starters.

Running August 11 to 20 at the Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto, this unique event offers an extraordinary opportunity for audiences to experience new plays and musicals in their early stages of development and see their evolution over multiple performances. It will present a slate of four fascinating and decidedly entertaining new theater pieces, along with a festival kickoff dinner and conversation with multi-award-winning playwrights David Henry Hwang and Rajiv Joseph. The festival will also include a special performance by actor/activist Shakina (NBC’s “Connecting” and “Quantum Leap,” Hulu’s “Difficult People”).

This year’s offerings include Min Kahng’s rollicking Happy Pleasant Valley: A Senior Sex Scandal Murder Mystery Musical; Minita Gahndi’s Nerve, an aromatic dark comedy that includes onstage cooking and shares bites with the audience; Bess Welden’s Madeleines, a drama exploring sibling conflict, family legacies and a treasured Passover recipe; and Low Expectations, seasoned film and TV actor Michael Gaston’s globe-trotting solo show with music. The stripped-down performances will be helmed by such prominent directors as Jeffrey Lo, Leslie Martinson and Giovanna Sardelli, who also serves as Director of the New Works Festival and just happens to be the newly appointed Artistic Director of TheatreWorks Silicon Valley (busy woman!).

I recently caught up by phone with Min Kahng, who wrote the book, music and lyrics for Happy Pleasant Valley. Kahng is a Bay Area native whose career has been on quite a roll ever since his Four Immigrants: An American Musical Manga was a big hit for TheatreWorks in 2017, winning seven San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Awards, including “Entire Production – Bay Area.” We chatted about how his vibrant new musical came to be commissioned by TheatreWorks, how the pandemic led him to find the value in absurdity, his path to becoming a playwright and composer at a time when the work of Asian writers is still something of a rarity on major stages, and a couple of other tantalizing new works that he already has in the pipeline. In conversation, Kahng comes across as an easily approachable theater buff whose placid exterior masks a delightfully wild imagination constantly running just below the surface. The following has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Happy Pleasant Valley sounds like quite an unusual musical, to say the least. How would you describe your show?

Well, the subtitle does a good job to give you some of it – “senior sex scandal murder mystery musical.” But I also wanted to make sure that there was an emotional through line, so it surprisingly ends up being an intergenerational Korean American story as well. Just in that it happens to be Korean American lead characters thrown into a zany situation that causes a grandmother and a granddaughter to look at their relationship and really becomes a musical about connection and being authentic with each other.

The musical was commissioned by TheatreWorks. How did that come about?

It started off by TheatreWorks inviting me to their Writers’ Retreat back in 2019, which is an opportunity for playwrights and musical theater writers to just try ideas or work on whatever they’re working on. It’s often a chance for those who’ve already been commissioned to work on shows, but I was not commissioned at the time. They just invited me to see if there was a new idea I wanted to work on, and I had had this thought of writing a murder mystery musical combined with this scenario involving the sex lives of seniors. They were up for me experimenting, and essentially I wrote the first couple of scenes and songs at that Writers’ Retreat, and that’s what led to them deciding to commission me to finish the piece.

What stage is the script at right now in its development?

We did a workshop of the first full draft of it back in December of 2022. I try not to worry about what number of draft we’re on, but for the festival it at least will be another full draft. It’s a great and rare opportunity to be able to workshop something and have three performances of it, so that’ll be a chance to hear the [most recent] full draft and then makes changes between each of the three presentations.

This isn’t your first time participating in the New Works Festival. What do you personally want out of the experience this time?

Number one, it’s about the work itself and I think TheatreWorks is great about that. While there are public presentations, it’s really a chance to make the show better. For me, I know there are some things I want to work on and try out heading into the festival. I know the draft is not at a place where I feel confident of it getting produced yet – so it would be wonderful if by the end of the festival I felt fairly confident that it was, if not at the stage of being produced, that I now knew what the next few steps were to get it there.

Beyond that, honestly I do think this story itself lends itself to a lot of laughter. I laugh a lot when I’m writing it. I can’t believe I’m writing this and I can’t believe people are letting me write it. Something I really latched onto during the pandemic was absurdity and how it can also show humanity, because what we were experiencing collectively was absurd. I feel like fun and uplifting shows that elicit laughter are what we need, and so my hope is that people who come just feel the joy of experiencing theater, even a piece of theater that isn’t fully produced yet.

Four Immigrants was developed at the New Works Festival and then went on to become a big success for TheatreWorks as part of their regular season. Do you have a favorite memory from that whole experience?

There are so many, but one of the most impactful memories is the granddaughter of Henry Kiyama (the original artist of the Four Immigrants Manga) came to watch it. She is a senior herself and happens to be connected to the translator of the manga, Frederik L. Schodt, who lives here in Piedmont. Because he knew the family, he was able to invite them, and they were able to watch it, and she said she was moved by it.

And I was nervous, I wasn’t sure how she was gonna react cause I was taking something that belonged to their family. But I believe we got their (her and her husband) seal of approval so to speak, and we got a photograph of her with the actor who played her grandfather and Frederik the translator and myself against the backdrop of an image of Henry Kiyama. Back in 2013 when I first stumbled upon this book, I had no idea that that would occur, you know? So that was one of those special memories from that.

I’m always interested in what leads people to become theatermakers. Do you remember the first musical you ever saw onstage, or a work that impacted you early on?

I have an answer to both, because they’re two different answers. The ones that impacted me the most were the ones that were available to me on VHS. So – Sound of Music was one. Beauty and the Beast when that was released in 1992, the animated film, that was another big influence on me as a kid.

But I do remember in elementary school going to a community theater production of South Pacific. I don’t remember much of it, but it sticks in my brain that I went and saw that. When I think of it now, I realize that was probably a really small production, but even the fact that that memory is with me is telling. And then like many of us who are around my age, Phantom of the Opera was probably the first professional show that I saw when it was touring here in San Francisco – so that was one where I actually saw what a large production could be.

Were you a theater kid in high school?

I was not, actually. I was a choir and band kid, but I always had theater leanings and I think I was envious cause I would see others doing theater and I wished I could. But I also liked choir and band – so that was where I ended up.

Back when you were thinking of writing your first musical, did you ever feel like “Hmm, I’m not seeing a lot of musicals written by Asian Americans.”?

Absolutely. That was definitely the case. After Beauty and the Beast came out, I started to think maybe I wanted to be an animator. I don’t think my drawing skills were anything amazing, but it was the storytelling of the Disney films that appealed to me. And so I started to conceive of [a musical adaptation of] a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale called The Nightingale which takes place in China. And I started to consider what a Disney version of that would look like. I think the reason why that appealed to me was, one, I actually had performed it as a part of my English class back in third grade -

Really? That sounds pretty advanced for third grade!

Yeah, I don’t know if you know what the “Early Bird Late Bird” system is, but basically some kids would be “early birds” and some kids would be “late birds.” I think that was coded language for what level of ability you had in English or Literature. Late Birds were the ones who were (I hate the words around this) a little more “advanced.” I feel like that’s why we got to do things like put on plays, and I remember putting on a play version of The Nightingale and performing in it.

So that story stuck with me, but also because they were Asian characters. I still have sketches from maybe seventh grade of me drawing these characters as if I was still working on an animated version. I was really serious about it, and that actually ended up being my first full-length musical that I wrote as an adult. I had an adaptation called The Song of the Nightingale that premiered at the Altarena Playhouse in Alameda back in 2013.

So that’s a long-winded answer to say that yes, absolutely, the lack of Asian writers as well as Asian stories was very apparent to me, and so that has definitely been one of my goals and drivers, especially in the world of musical theater.

And as far as I’m aware, there still aren’t many writers of Asian descent getting their work produced at larger theaters.

Correct.

Although in the last 18 months, I’ve interviewed composers Justin Huertas and Adam Gwon who’ve both had musicals done at TheatreWorks, so maybe that’s a sign of some progress. Are you finding more opportunities opening up to get your work produced?

I would say only in so much as I think our current theater culture is more aware of the need than they used to be maybe ten years ago. Or – if they were aware of the need, they still didn’t see the way in which the system was already kind of unintentionally limiting people of color from being able to have their stuff produced. I feel like now there’s much more of an open awareness.

That doesn’t mean that I feel necessarily like I have “arrived,” even though depending on who you talk to, some people perceive me as having kind of reached a certain point [of success]. But I’m somewhere in between right now. My work is getting produced. I was lucky enough to get four productions this year, which is great coming out of the pandemic, but I still feel like I’m workin’ hard to get my name out there. But I am definitely seeing more Asian writers in musical theater, so that’s encouraging, and I am definitely seeing and hearing of more productions around the country written by Asian writers.

Being significantly older than you, I grew up in an era when in terms of Asian stories in musical theater there was like The King and I and then Miss Saigon, and that was pretty much it.

You say you’re older than me and that’s all there was - well, for me that’s all there was! [laughs] So that’s how much progress was made in the decades from the 1950s to the 2000s. I feel like it wasn’t until the new Flower Drum Song first of all, and then Allegiance, and finally now we’re getting KPOP and Here Lies Love. It’s been decades in the making for progress on this.

As a composer and lyricist, do you have people you particularly look up to?

Yeah! I’m mean I’m boring – Sondheim. [laughs sheepishly] Cause everybody loves Sondheim.

But, but how can you not?!

Yeah, it’s so true. Just the way that his work tells the story he feels like he’s a playwright writing musically, if that makes any sense. That his words aren’t just song lyrics and then we put them into a show. They actually feel integral to the world that is being created. He’s definitely a huge inspiration.

Musically, Alan Menken who is the composer of those Disney films that inspired me, for his ability to write compelling melodies. Then there’s a whole crop of other people for various reasons, but I would say those two [in particular] helped form and inform me as a composer and lyricist.

What is the most fun part of your job?

Honestly, it’s getting into the room with the actors and other team members, the musical director etc., and actually hearing it performed in real time. Maybe that’s the pandemic reaction of not being able to do that for so long, but it feels there’s a certain level of reality brought to it once you hear other people interpreting the words and the music, and you get to talk about it with them and work on the story.

Do you have any other new work currently in the pipeline that you can talk about yet?

Yeah, I mean this is another result of the pandemic, because I had nothing else to do except work on a whole bunch of things. I just had a reading of a new play called The Last Tram at Playwright’s Foundation in partnership with Crowded Fire. It has nothing to do with the pandemic, but it’s something I wrote during the pandemic, and it’s basically again in this world of absurdity. It’s a Universal Studios tram ride gone horribly wrong, intermingled with a man’s coming to terms with his estranged relationship with his father who is dead and appearing to him in weird, surrealistic hallucinations.

Another one that is fairly fresh is a collaboration with book writer and lyricist Weston Eric Scott. We’re working on a parody of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, but it also sends up of the story of Lot and Sodom and Gomorrah. It’s tentatively titled Lot & the Psychedelic Sodomy-Proof Raincoat, and it will have kind of a saccharine quality that Joseph has, juxtaposed with these “clobber passages” [from the Bible] that have been used and continue to be used to demonize queer people. Our hope is that it can show how these verses are absurd in and of themselves, as well as hopefully also be a celebration of and for the LGBTQ community.

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TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s 20th Anniversary New Works Festival runs August 11-20, 2023 at the Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Rd., Palo Alto. Festival passes and single event tickets can be purchased online at theatreworks.org or by calling (650) 463-1960.

 

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