Theatre in Australia is so white, says playwright Michelle Law, that if you are a person of colour, “it almost feels like you don’t have a right to be there”.
Previews are about to start for Law’s new play, Single Asian Female. Produced by La Boite and opening at the Roundhouse Theatre in Brisbane next week, Law tells Guardian Australia that she wrote the “dark family comedy” partly out of a desire to put something on stage she could relate to.
Based on a blog she had been keeping by the same name, which documented her experiences as a single Asian woman in Australia, Single Asian Female follows the lives of a Chinese-Australian woman and her two daughters living on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, who are about to face a major turning point in their lives.
“I’d always been interested in writing for theatre but never thought there’d be an opportunity,” Law says.
She began working on the script while participating in the Lotus Playwriting Project, an initiative run by Contemporary Asian Australian Performance in partnership with Playwriting Australia.
The support structure provided by the program, and the camaraderie of “being in a room full of people in the same boat professionally and culturally” gave Law the boost she needed. “I don’t know if I would have had the initiative to follow through with it without [that support],” she says.
Australian theatre has a reputation for being monocultural, and Law describes her own experiences of theatregoing as one marked by a sense of exclusion, and envy of the audiences who could go along to a play confident they were going to see themselves reflected on stage. “I hope that my play will have some small role in making Asian Australians, migrants, people of colour, and women feel more at home in the theatre.”
It is notable that Law’s play, which explicitly engages with issues of race and gender, has found a home at La Boite. The company has a growing reputation for supporting new Australian work that amplifies diverse voices; their acclaimed 2015 production of Prize Fighter by Future D Fidel, for example, was significant in part for the fact that the writer and 80% of its cast were non-Anglo – a marked rarity on the Australian stage.
For Law, the issue is not just about the faces on stage, but the voices behind the scenes as well. “If it is a story that is about a particular culture then you need to have consultants at least in the room or in development of the work,” she says.
She sees the development of migrant and non-Anglo Australian voices as critical to appealing to a new generation of theatregoers. “Once this current generation dies out and theatre subscriptions become more affordable, you’re going to see a shift in the types of people attending theatre and you’re going to sees a shift in the kinds of stories they want to see. I think it’s changing but it’s very slow. I also think people are wary of new, original works, and maybe that’s an industry issue that comes from funding – you want to put on shows that are safe, that draw in crowds … but you also want to draw in younger crowds, new crowds.”
Single Asian Female is a comedy, but that doesn’t mean Law isn’t thinking about the politics of her work.
“I have a lot of faith in people who are consuming my work that they will be able to look through the surface comedy at the messages that I’m trying to put forward,” she says.
One of Law’s objectives for the play was to dismantle received ideas about gender and race – most particularly, the persistent stereotypes that circulate about Asian women.
“There’s a tendency, not only in the dating sphere but workplace and interpersonal relationships, for Asian women [to be seen as] being submissive, meek, exoticised, sexualised far more than other women in a sense,” Law says. She mentions, by way of example, the sheer volume of pornography that exoticises Asian women. “I want the play to be told from the authentic perspective of someone who has that authority to tell that story, just to show people that Asian women are assertive and strong – and they do bitch about the shit that happens to them – with each other!”
Is there a lot of bitching in the play, then?
“It’s done with love!” Law laughs. “It’s coming from a place of wanting to find some common ground with people who have had those experiences but have nowhere to vent that frustration.”
• Single Asian Female starts previews on Saturday 11 February and will show at the Roundhouse Theatre in Brisbane until 4 March
