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[0:07] Christine Toy Johnson: Welcome to season five of the Dramatists Guild Presents: Talkback.

[0:11] Christine Toy Johnson: I'm your host, Christine Toy Johnson. This season is all about how we can challenge the status quo and not only expand the canon of what plays are taught, read, programmed, and used to define the idea of what classics are, but also to ignite it with new actionable strategies.

[0:31] Christine Toy Johnson: To me, this is not about canceling the existing canon. It's about being intentional about how we make space for additional, diverse, and inclusive stories, as well as reimagining often-produced ones so that the American landscape of storytelling is truly reflective of the gorgeous tapestry of people that inhabit it.

[0:52] Christine Toy Johnson: In this episode, we'll talk to writers Diana Burbano and Jason Ma about their views on making room in the canon for works that center a wider array of characters, cultures, and stories, or are in languages other than English. Thank you so much for joining us today. Would you please introduce yourselves to our listeners? Diana.

[1:13] Diana Burbano: Hi, everybody. I'm Diana Burbano, and I am a Latinx immigrant playwright and also an actor. And yeah, that's what I do.

[1:25] Christine Toy Johnson: Great. Thank you, Jason.

[1:27] Jason Ma: Hi, everyone. I'm Jason Ma. I am a composer-writer for the theater. And I identify as an Asian American, Chinese American, gay man, and theater artist.

[1:43] Christine Toy Johnson: Thank you so much. I wanted to talk to you both about how we can challenge the even subconscious notion that the canon in the American theater can only include works in English and center people who speak English, which is, as we all know, really what has been the status quo since the beginning of time. So I'd love to start with asking you each, what are you working on right now? And what have some of your challenges, if there have been, or triumphs, if hopefully there have been, in getting these specific stories out in the world? I'll start with Diana.

[2:26] Diana Burbano: Thank you, Christine. I'm so happy to be here. Currently I'm working on a piece called Beheading Columbus, and it's about a pair of Latin sisters who one is darker, one is actually Afro-Latinx, and the other is white Latin, which is something that I'm really interested in talking about, which because we don't discuss it very much. So that's a little bit of a difficult entryway to people who don't understand that we have colorism in this community. And so I write a lot of things in Spanish, and I don't write it for my English-speaking audiences, if that makes sense. The Spanish is for people who are bilingual, and they catch the jokes, and they're jokes that are meant to be for people who are bilingual. So it's okay with me if a lot of the time the people who aren't bilingual don't understand it because that's part of why I'm writing it in Spanish.

[3:18] Diana Burbano: I'll just say really quickly one of the things that has been a bit of a problem for me and for other writers to use Spanish is I've just noticed a lot of resistance to the language. It seems very obviously it, yeah, it seems off-putting, and I understand that if you don't speak the language, you may feel that you're not being included. But like I said, that's the point sometimes is to include an audience that isn't normally included at all. That's part of the reason I started writing. I never saw myself on stage ever. I feel like it's okay to be a little bit exclusive about the language for a while.

[3:55] Christine Toy Johnson: I'm so interested in diving into that a little more. What do you say to people who may push back on this concept? And how do you navigate trying to include them?

[4:07] Diana Burbano: Yeah, of course. I do try to explain that you know how sometimes we don't get all the jokes. I certainly with say really young playwrights, there are things that I don't get. I'm just going to be honest about that and I have to have them explain to me. Or obviously there are things we don't know. I think if you came into the theater knowing everything, you wouldn't have a very good time. My favorite kind of plays are plays that are going to be, well, I won't say teaching me things because that sounds didactic, but I really do like to learn things I don't know. So I try to approach it from that direction.

[4:39] Diana Burbano: And I do like I have seen theater in Spanish with subtitles. I have seen theater in other languages with subtitles. For me personally, kind of like watching theater in languages that I don't know very well without the subtitles just because it's it interests me what I can learn without them. But I do understand. And the problem with subtitles for me is that sometimes they interfere and they never get translated exactly like what you're trying to say so I feel it loses a lot of the flavor. So I'm I don't know about that. I'm a little bit on the fence on the whole subtitle thing, except that I know that if we want to get more of our stuff produced, we're going to need them so people don't feel like they're being left out.

[5:22] Christine Toy Johnson: Yeah, we're going to talk about this in another episode this season about what I recently heard Roger Q. Mason refer to as this time of anti-discomfort. And I think that yeah, that really it applies to so much of what we're talking about of challenging that comfort zone, right? For people, so that maybe they will learn something in a different way from seeing a piece of theater that isn't necessarily in their first language.

[5:51] Diana Burbano: Yeah, thank you, Diana. Jason, do you have something you want to add to that?

[5:55] Jason Ma: Oh, yeah, my gosh, Diana, you have inspired me so much with what you've just said. I think one thing we have to start talking about is the English speaking canon versus a global canon of theater. They can't be the same thing. And I think what Diana is also speaking to is that not everything in canon has to be for English speaking audiences, guaranteed to make them comfortable. And honestly, I've been thinking about subtitles a lot too lately, because I just think that language is part of the culture. Culture is language, language is culture. When you translate into American vernacular English or just American English for audiences, you are really in some ways diluting the culture that's being presented on stage.

[6:51] Jason Ma: And so you have to find I think we do have to make people comfortable because they do need to be able to understand in their own way what's going on. But I think we also have to acknowledge, and I think we need to let our audiences know that these subtitles are not the complete picture. They don't present the entire idea of what's actually happening. I speak some Chinese, and I'm not super fluent, nor am I super literate as far as, and I would never pretend to write in Chinese itself, but even I can see when I look at subtitles how inadequate they are for presenting the sort of social intricacies and cultural specificities of what's being presented on stage.

[7:40] Jason Ma: And I think that's something we have to continue to explore as artists. I just saw a play, I shouldn't say just saw, but I saw a play at MTC called Golden Shield by this amazing Thai Australian playwright. Her name is Anchuli Felicia King. And she has a translator character who is like the stage manager in Our Town. And what is interesting about him is that he'll translate directly, but then he'll comment on the translation, basically saying that's just really inadequate to describe what's actually happening. And as the play goes on, there are moments when he literally stops translating because it's beyond words and meaning what's going on stage.

[8:23] Jason Ma: And I think that is a really it was a really lovely exploration of the inadequacy of translation. Things get lost, literally lost in translation.

[8:35] Diana Burbano: Yeah.

[8:36] Jason Ma: So yes, Diana, thank you. You've really gotten me thinking.

[8:40] Jason Ma: Yeah, and just I always joke, it's like English for clarity, Spanish for poetry.

[8:46] Christine Toy Johnson: Yes, that's so interesting. I want to explore the idea of how we illuminate the poetry we're trying to convey when we write in other languages, and how the musicality of those languages can transcend language. Diana?

[9:02] Diana Burbano: I think for me and for the Latin plays that I know are out there, one of the problems that we have is that most of the time the bigger theaters, especially out here in on the West Coast and some of the regionals, they like a certain kind of story. And I sometimes call it trauma porn. They really love when it comes to like border stories and they just love that. So I wonder if they wouldn't start looking at different kinds of ways to tell a story, especially by Latin playwrights, and explore something a little bit different.

[9:35] Diana Burbano: I think the problem is the connection points that some of these stories give the audience is mostly for them to watch and feel empathy and feel like oh, or sometimes feel superior, frankly, I think. So if there were more theaters in some of the or more theaters that were willing to look at different kinds of stories, I feel like the audience might see that there are things that we're not so different about with our kids and our parents, and it that doesn't feel so much, I don't know. There's just so much that gets seen that feels it feels like cartoon Latinos.

[10:15] Jason Ma: And I think that's part of the problem.

[10:17] Jason Ma: Yeah, yeah, it's that perpetuation of a comfortable stereotype or series people are used to seeing.

[10:23] Christine Toy Johnson: Absolutely. And Jason, can you talk about the production of Twelfth Night that you recently were the composer for? I'm really, I really want people to know about how the production, Nelson Eusebio, the director, and you and the artistic team brought out the various specific cultures of the actors in the characters.

[10:45] Jason Ma: Nelson, who is fairly a new arrival to his position as associate artistic director at Kansas City Rep, wanted to reintroduce classics into the season on a regular basis. But he also wanted to find a way, a different way in what we think of traditionally, which is, I think this is pretty much the way we've been thinking about, let's say, doing Shakespeare is that we produce a fairly open concept or familiar concept setting, and we try to cast diversity because it's a classic and we can do that now.

[11:25] Diana Burbano: But all the people of color, the black artists, the people with differing identities, we all come to this concept. We all fit ourselves into what is usually the white western gloss of the environment, and we speak and act, and we all go back to the majority culture and we fold ourselves in, we assimilate. And what Nelson was thinking very much about after coming out of lockdown and all the societal tumult that was going on is what do we do now with Shakespeare? What do we do now with Twelfth Night? And what he decided to do ultimately is to cast it first with people he trusted, with people with very strong connections to their own worlds and identities. And then we, as writers and designers and everybody, we talked to each cast member about their culture, about their experience of their culture, their specific lived life in the culture.

And we created music, costumes, scenic design, everything based on their cultural identity. Our Orsino is a black American man who is a blues guitar player. And he loved 70s soul, hip hop, a plethora of black music. And we turned these into the two major worlds of the play, but we also had a festi who was Latino with a guitar and indigenous Latin, I'm sorry, an indigenous flute from the Philippines. And we incorporated all of this into the world and folded it together and created a new world where all of these influences were the world in which we lived as the play went on. And I've never been a part of something so beautiful and organic and respectful. There's such beauty in the idea of not trying to fit into the majority expectation, but really leaning into what makes us individual, right? And bringing that out. I love that so much. When we return, Jason and I talk about some of the technical challenges of writing in languages other than English.

[14:10] Christine Toy Johnson: Welcome back. I want to shift our conversation a little bit to the challenges that Jason, you and I, full disclosure, you and I have been lifelong friends and also collaborators for a really long time. The problems we have come into with various writing software programs that do not support the diacritical markings of various Chinese dialects. So we're not writing in Chinese, but we're writing, for example, names that are Chinese that would have existed in the time period in which we were writing. But we really had to search for a font that would accurately document these markings. And I wonder if either one of you wants to speak to any issues you might have come into with writing programs or software programs.

And I also am a very big fan of Final Draft. I've used Final Draft since it was in like maybe version two or something. So I'm a big fan of theirs. But I do find that this is one of the shortcomings that I hope to address with them in person at some point.

[15:25] Jason Ma: Yeah, it is a shortcoming. It doesn't, one of the big problems I have is that it doesn't add the accent marks, which is not a big deal. I can do them myself, but it does slow me down because I'm a two-finger typist anyway. But then it doesn't, when you do spell check, it won't spell check the Spanish. And I know that's a small thing, but it does get to be a pain to have to go back and forth and make sure that everything is correct. And because also the punctuation in Spanish is different.

[15:51] Diana Burbano: Yeah, it's definitely a bit of a, it's, I don't think it's as big a problem for me, but it's irritating.

[16:01] Jason Ma: Yeah, it's like a microaggression, right? It's annoying and it's a thing that's excluding. And I don't use Final Draft because I just feel like a Mac word processing program is much more user-friendly for what we're trying to do. This is a larger issue. It is, we literally have a writing program that is supposed to be the industry standard of professionalism and Chris and I have had to basically find the one font that will support this. And even so it won't let us do italics, it's not a very good looking font and it creates formatting problems and it also gives this air of amateurism, I'll just say it doesn't look right. Your font is your business suit when you're a writer, it is what you want to present to the world and what you want to say about yourself as a writer.

And we have been reduced to, I guess you would call it like the pink toe shoes of fonts. We are not, we are people of color and we have to put pancake on our toe shoes to make it look right. And it's not right. We should be able to use the marks that we need to use and like Chris said, it's not even like we're writing in Chinese, we are just wanting to use some pinyin markings so that actors will be assisted in the pronunciation of the Chinese names and geographical locations that we have in the piece. I'll just say I think it is annoying. It seems minor, but when you add it into the mix of all the other things that we have to struggle to push through, it just becomes one more thing to have to stress over.

[17:40] Christine Toy Johnson: It really does. Now that you say it that way, which I think is quite brilliant, it's sort of a denial that there are people in this country who speak other languages or who don't even don't speak the way you. I'm neurodivergent. And so some, the reason I like Final Draft is because it does all the work for me in a way. I'm not publicly shaming Final Draft because, as I said, I'm a big fan of theirs, but I did have this experience where I contacted customer service, which has always been extremely responsive and very quickly to me, and said, I'm having this issue where I need to find a font that will allow me to use some pinyin diacritical markings. I'm writing in English, but I'm, for example, using these Chinese names, and they need to have markings on them that are correct.

And the person sent me back a link to the font in Mandarin. And I just, that just pointed out to me that there is a fundamental breakdown in even the understanding that there can be or there are writers who are writing in English but about a different culture, and those cultures might have places, names, different expressions that need to be accurately accented, or whatever you want to say about that. And so I just feel like this, we don't really talk about this very much, and I'm very grateful to the both of you for having this conversation with me about it.

[19:07] Christine Toy Johnson: Let's see. I wanted to talk. Let me ask you both. What other thoughts and ideas do you have? When I first raised this question in having this episode, what other things came to your mind that you would like to mention?

[19:25] Diana Burbano: I was thinking about when Jason was talking about Twelfth Night. One of the things that we're working on out here is allowing young actors to speak in their own dialects, especially Latin actors, because there's a perception that the, for example, the Istele accent was heavy, but it's definitely like a regular accent, right? And somehow allowing that accent to exist, but make it clearer, make it easier to understand the words as any actor would, but not completely erasing it. I think the English allowed people to use their own Yorkshire accents years and years ago. So I think we're behind on that as well.

[20:07] Christine Toy Johnson: That is so interesting. That's such an interesting point. Jason, do you have anything to add to that?

[20:15] Jason Ma: I think that that is an interesting thing that we should be exploring, especially with classic works. And also, again, you know, when we all kind of default to American standard stage English, we're not challenging people, are we? We're not, we're actually in some ways participating in erasure and so tricky because we are so used to hearing things in a certain way, and we are comfortable with that. And to the point where we're told what is right and what is wrong. I think this is a really interesting idea. And I think I'm sure that as we go forward, we'll be hearing more and more different ways of pronouncing words on stage on American stages. And I look forward to that. I can't wait, actually.

[21:05] Diana Burbano: You've got me really excited about this. Well, it supports the idea that there are a wide, like you said, a wide variety of accents and people's vernacular and how we reflect that on their stages. On the flip side of that, I don't think it hasn't happened to me lately, but I know that it was very common practice back in the day to be asked to just do an quote unquote Asian accent. And people didn't really care what country it was from, just that it sounded like something foreign that resembled.

[21:48] Jason Ma: Yeah, uh, you can I'm sure you have the same experience, but this, the lack of specificity reflecting the lack of understanding that there are indeed different cultures is something that was very widespread.

[22:02] Diana Burbano: Yeah, it's not, I don't think it's gone. I know that fairly recently there was a Broadway revival of a show with a large Asian cast where the person who was in charge of dialects basically told a large number of people in the room that they should just speak the way you do at home with your mother.

[22:26] Diana Burbano: And we'll call it a day. And we're talking about a an API cast. Yeah. We're not talking about a cast of people all from the country that was being portrayed in that project. And the laziness and also just the dismissiveness of that kind of—and this is a professional dialect person. This was a speech person hired for this production at a major theater. It will continue to happen. And luckily, I believe more and more people now are willing to push back against this kind of disrespect. I just—there are these old battles that we continue to have to fight. And I've been doing this for so long, and yet things don't seem to move much. It's a little disheartening, but it also gives those of us whose plays take forever to get produced a chance to stay relevant longer because the same problems are still the same problems. So in a way, it's a double-edged sword for me.

[23:27] Diana Burbano: Yeah, I keep saying it's the same objectives but different obstacles that we are trying to get these stories out in the world. And sometimes, I think in some ways doors are opening more and more, but then there's still that barrier of convincing the gatekeepers that they are the stories are relevant, that they will be received in a way that we hope they will be received. And I'd love to talk a little bit more about that and how we can keep forging ahead.

[24:14] Jason Ma: Find a coach that can differentiate that because I also have been in rooms as an actor with dialect coaches coaching us in our accents and thinking to myself, our accent—we're just as fluid as you guys are, and we use new words and we play and we—everybody—yeah, it's just—it's not that strict either.

[24:39] Diana Burbano: Didn't it interesting?

[24:39] Jason Ma: Yeah.

[24:39] Diana Burbano: I'd love to know if you both have ever worked with a dramaturg as well.

[24:44] Jason Ma: That is from the specific culture that you're writing in.

[24:50] Diana Burbano: No.

[24:51] Jason Ma: Nope.

[24:52] Diana Burbano: Nope.

[24:54] Jason Ma: Yeah.

[24:55] Diana Burbano: No. I do—I have been lucky enough to work with Latin dramaturges, but I'm a Colombian. I like to write about Colombians just because we never see Colombians. So I—and yeah, I've only done one of my plays where I had Colombian actors in it, which is something else we could talk about too. Like what's—for me, pan Latin. I certainly am not advocating for only Colombians can play Colombians because otherwise I never would have had an acting career. But there is something to also make sure—how do we let the audiences know that we're not all the same? We've come from different cultures, we have, like you say, different languages, different accents, different—the slang in Spanish is completely different from country to country. That's something also that needs—we need to give our theater audiences a little clue on, I think.

[25:50] Jason Ma: And that's probably on us as writers.

[25:53] Diana Burbano: I've been hearing echoes through the industry of lately of people basically trying to confine actors of color to their countries of origin. And that worries me greatly because I feel like brown actors already have so little opportunity, and for us to be coordinating people off into these tiny little boxes when we never would ask white actors to do such a thing worries me. So I feel like the specificity of culture and authenticity needs to come from the writers themselves, and that the actors do their job, which is to act and to inhabit those cultures and the specific behaviors and languages and accents of the people that they're portraying.

[26:42] Jason Ma: Yes.

[26:43] Diana Burbano: Which leads me to another subject, which is therefore the writers of these plays and musicals really need to understand and know and be familiar with and inhabit the culture that they're writing about as well. And writers should know when it's appropriate for them to write about these worlds and when maybe they should step back and sit down.

[27:07] Jason Ma: Yeah, so I'm glad you bring it up because just like you're hearing some people are being boxed into only portraying their specific cultural background, there are also writers—people from historically excluded communities who are being told you can only now write about your community, even though you have lived in a white majority society for your whole life, if you have, etc. What I'd love to ask you about is if we look at the plays and musicals that are in the Western canon, how can they coexist with the inclusion of stories from the global majority? We've had a golden age musicals that take place in various countries that are not America, written by white writers, and how do they fit in now?

[28:06] Diana Burbano: I think we always have to look at things through three different lenses, right? When it was written, what it was written about, and today's sensibilities.

[28:14] Jason Ma: Yeah, I used to joke that I played all two of the Latin characters in musical theater.

[28:22] Diana Burbano: Yeah.

[28:23] Jason Ma: Yeah, no, I think one of the things we're gonna have to share is that there are plays out there that can speak to the alternative canon. I—out here at South Coast Repertory, they just did The Little Foxes and they paired it with Brenton Jacob Jenkins' Appropriate, which was great. Do you know? Because it really revived a play that I think many of us have seen, but in conversation with the other play, it becomes something different. I thought that was a brilliant idea. It takes a little bit of legwork by the literary department, but so much of it is diversifying the artistic side of the theaters and diversifying the boards of the theaters to start looking at that and start creating their own canon. I mean, give them the power to think, oh, we're on the forefront of the new canon, do you know?

[29:12] Diana Burbano: I let me speak to the musical theater canon. I'm still fighting the old battles because I feel like we are moving more slowly. Honestly, it is moving more slowly in the musical theater. And that's part partially a result of economics and tradition, shall we say? For us, the two biggies—King and I and Miss Saigon—have been basically the two sort of tentpoles of the canon for decades now. And both have become problematic. Both have artistic merit, especially The King and I, which is probably one of the most beautifully written pieces of musical theater. I personally will probably never do that show again as an actor, but I acknowledge it as a beautiful piece of writing and storytelling. And I think the solution really for the canon—for the canon to take care of it, to nurture it—is to start including more portrayals of Asian people. So that it just—the King and I becomes one of many as opposed to the one representation of. And it will take the sting out of it for people who are rightly offended by what takes place in that show.

[30:38] Jason Ma: We need to find some way to—how do I put this—keep the traditionalists comfortable while we introduce them to new people, new worlds, new writers. We can't just tear it down. It is a uniquely American art form. And I think that the bigger theaters and the smaller theaters and the commercial producers are all starting to open up their minds. I know for myself, a piece that I wrote just about 25 years ago, which was outright hated and rejected from the onset, eventually began to be taken seriously by people to being considered by people to finally getting a production 25 years later. It's a young man's piece, but it took that long for I would say the entrenched powers that be to understand and maybe open up their minds and their hearts to the idea that there could be a piece like this that centered around Asian people where they were not existing in reaction to the West, but existing on their own in their own worlds. And it's hopeful to me. It's hopeful to me that more and more pieces that center themselves around people who are not white are being considered and actually being produced in our industry.

[32:14] Diana Burbano: I think we just have to keep writing, and I think we just have to keep our eye on what made us fall in love with musical theater as writers. And if we keep that in our writing and tell our own stories in our own way, people will come to it.

[32:29] Jason Ma: Yes, absolutely.

[32:30] Diana Burbano: Thank you so much. I'm gonna wrap us up here. Thank you both so much for your insight. It is at the tip of the iceberg of this conversation. And appreciative of you both your generosity and your wisdom and your talents.

[33:01] Christine Toy Johnson: Our music was composed by Andrea Daly, recorded at John Marshall Media in New York City. Special thanks to Sound of Birmingham in Birmingham, Alabama. The Dramatist Guild Presents Talkback is a production of the Dramatists Guild of America and distributed by the Broadway Podcast Network. Let us know what you thought about the episode by using hashtag DG TalkBack. As always, to be continued.