April 2018 | Stage & Candor

Posted on April 11, 2018April 10, 2018 by admin

A Conversation with Penny Pun

It is always a rare treat to discover a fellow Hong Kong transplant in the New York theater community, and this time, the blessing came in the form of Penny Pun. Speaking with Penny tugged at my heartstrings and energized my spirits, and I dare anyone not to be inspired by her resilience. Read on to find out more about this indomitable soul, who has and continues to persist through every obstacle life has thrown her way.

Michelle Tse: I want to start with your experience with growing up in Hong Kong. What juts out to you in terms of being differently abled, and growing up in public housing?

Penny Pun: When I started primary school, my parents put me in a special education school. It was about 200 students with only 20 students who had the abilities of a mainstream curriculum, so I have always been hanging around those 20 students throughout my whole primary school education. And then once I reached secondary school, I decided that I would transfer to a mainstream school because I thought I need to get out of the “special-needs world” to “the real world” anyway, I might as well get out now.

So I transferred to a mainstream school and then it was a public school serving multiple public housing sectors, so the kids there were low-income and lower-middle class students. It was difficult. It was just under 2,000 students. I mean in America, it’s nothing, but in Hong Kong, [I went from] a special ed school with 200 kids in one school, and 10 kids in a class, to 40 kids in one classroom. So …

MT: Wait, so it went from 20 kids to 40.

PP: It went from 20 kids in two classes to 40 kids in one class. So it was a lot. And because I got good grades, and most secondary schools in Hong Kong have the elitist practice to put the top 40 students in one class for all courses. I always was around hanging around with those 40 people, so I got a relatively stable social circle, compared to people who got reassigned every year, so that was good. But it was getting increasingly difficult. It’s just more exhausting for me to do something, and then the Hong Kong curriculum for secondary schools get more and more insane as you advance. And my teachers were working us really hard! I mean, I go to school at 8am, and then I have extra classes til 7pm. After I go home, I still have three hours’ worth of homework and studying.

MT: Was this typical?

PP: It was very typical. I was at school, and they’re telling me you’re never getting out of this neighborhood. Only [about] 15 people go to college every year from my school, and then about 25 more go to the equivalent of community college or other diploma or certificate programs, and they were serving about 200 students per grade.

MT: Wow.

PP: So yep, you’re told you’re never getting out. And I went to this crazy conservative school, like your skirt can’t be above your knees; it had to cover your whole knee. Your bangs can’t go past your brows… stuff like that. So I wasn’t fitting in. I was exhausted. By the time I reached 8th grade, I found out that my friend from primary school died. Nobody bothered to tell me, because he died around Chinese New Year, so everybody was like, “we shouldn’t talk about this right now, we shouldn’t talk about this.”

MT: Why did he pass away?

PP: It was muscular dystrophy. I knew that he was gonna pass away at some point during his (and my) mid-to-late teen years, I just didn’t know when it happened. [Nobody] talked about it, until I called up one of my friends, asking him, “How is he doing?” and he told me he passed away. So yeah… Everything was crashing down, and then I had a breakdown, and I didn’t go to school for four days, which is a big deal for students in Hong Kong because you need a doctor’s note, or else it counts as truancy, and could eventually result in me being kicked out of school. But I couldn’t even get out the door to get the doctor’s note.

MT: Right.

PP: Because of my disability, I have always had doctors following my situation, so my parents called my pediatric surgeon and he put me in line to see a therapist at a government-funded clinic, and then I started going to the therapist for like three months before I came back to full school days. I usually just leave early because of panic attacks and other psychosomatic symptoms. I got therapy over the course of a year. It was therapy at a government-funded clinic, so [eventually] the therapist told me that I was well enough to discontinue treatment.

MT: So that was eighth to ninth grade.

PP: Yeah. After that my parents got called up by the Make A Wish Foundation. They were like, does your child want to use it because we have “too much money,” and we have to give it away somewhere. My parents were involved in advocacy for disabled children. That’s why the foundation got their number. My parents asked me what I want to do. I knew that I wanted to be in theater by then, so I told them can I have a summer course at NYU, and they were like no, it’s not how the foundation functions, so I asked for a seven day trip to New York instead, and then [at the time] the revival of Rent was running, so I got to see that because, basically Rent is the reason I’m doing this. During those three months [when] I couldn’t even make it through a school day, Rent helped me a lot with coping with my friend’s death and being different.

MT: Is that how you got into theater?

PP: Yeah. That was when I fell love with theater and started considering doing it as a career. But at that point, all I was doing was watching theater-related videos on YouTube and reading theater blogs. The access to theater in Hong Kong was scarce, especially for a person with low-income.

MT: How did you find it?

PP: “Glee.” I was watching “Glee.” [At the time,] “Glee” was broadcasting in Hong Kong, and I discovered Rent when they did a cover of one of the songs.

MT: Oh, okay. And then, since that trip, how then did you cater your public school education to a point where you were able to get into college here in the US?

PP: So after I came back to Hong Kong from New York—

MT: So this was 9th grade, or 10th grade? 10th grade?

PP: Yes. After my therapy. I knew I wanted to be here, so I started looking at what I can do to make it happen. On the financial side, I found the Sir Edward Youde Memorial Overseas Scholarship for Disabled Students, and applied. In regard to the curricular and academic requirements, I self-studied the SAT, on top of my regular education. I remember I bought two copies of the Princeton Review and registered at the SAT exams they have in Hong Kong. Then asked my teachers to help me generate an English translation of my transcript and write me recommendation letters, which you don’t need for university admission in Hong Kong. They were looking at me weird, but they did it, and I got all my things to Marymount online, and got accepted. A couple months later, I found out that I got the scholarship, and that made it possible for me to accept the offer from Marymount, because it was completely impossible without a scholarship.

MT: Right. And even with the scholarship, you had a timeframe, right?

PP: Yeah, the scholarship would only provide for me for three years. They are open to giving me a interest free loan for a fourth year, but a loan is a loan, not a scholarship, so I graduated college [in] three years.

MT: And the scholarship, was it a set amount of money or was it just, we will provide everything for three years?

PP: It was a set amount of money. It was I think about $32,000 a year, so it doesn’t cover everything. My parents took out a loan for the rest.

MT: Granted, you were here for college and you were in Hong Kong for elementary and high school, but how do you see the difference in the education systems?

PP: I can definitely see that where you get your education means a lot. If I’m a high school student here and I got [the] grades [that I got], I’d have more options in terms of colleges, I think. But my grades in Hong Kong meant nothing here. I got something like a 74 out of 100 GPA, which is pretty low, if you use the American standard, but in Hong Kong, I was the top of my class, and ranking was more important than score. So it’s really important where you get your education, and there is definitely a glass ceiling internationally, and it was a glass ceiling that can only be broken with money—paying for an education at private international schools. And when I was moving from elementary school to high school, my grades also meant nothing because I came from a special ed school. So I basically did not get into the best school that I could have, for my grades, so yeah, there’s definitely a parity, due to the bias that disabled children get “special and nicer treatments.”

American kids just have more freedom with their education. It’s not unusual for you to take a psychology class or theater class or writing class in high school if you wanted to, and discover and pursue your interests early. However, [in Hong Kong] our class schedule is decided by the faculty, because of the culture is so that you’re stuck with certain kids and classes for the next six years of your life, and don’t care if you like it or not, or if it helps you develop to be a well-rounded person.

MT: I left after sixth grade—but I remember my older sister actually had to take physics, biology, and chemistry together for three years, or something like that. Here it’s–for my highly ranked public high school in Silicon Valley when I was there a decade ago, anyway–physics one year, chemistry one year and then biology one year, and I think you do it in the order you wanted to. I actually think from my high school you only had to take like two of the three or something like that, and I don’t think it was even for the whole year, but a semester or two quarters. Maybe things have changed, though. I think my sister had something like thirteen subjects a year in high school in Hong Kong. That’s typical, right? More or less?

PP: Something like that. Twelvish.

MT: And here it’s like five, and seven is a lot. I remember thinking, seven classes, that’s it, really?

PP: And classes are quarter or semester long here. In Hong Kong you don’t really have choices, they schedule everything for you–

MT: The entire year.

PP: They schedule your teacher for you, everything is completely decided for you. Just show up.

MT: What do you wish people knew about Asians or Asian-Americans—I guess Chinese Americans, and Chinese—that you wish they would stop confusing, or asking about?

PP: First of all, I think the biggest thing is that they have to know that not every Asian-looking person is from China. Chinese Americans and Chinese like me actually have really different experiences, and it’s dangerous for someone to generalize all of these experiences. I was just telling the writers of color in my writers’ group that if I sit in on an Asian-American writers’ group, the way I think is different from the way [American-born Chinese] think. It’s not the same thing. Chinese American, and Chinese who moved here, zero-generation, are not the same thing.

And, just ask. I don’t know how to describe it, but sometimes they’ll talk to you and they are really aware of the fact that they are talking to a Chinese person or Chinese American and then they’re just talking to a Chinese American about their experiences with China or other Chinese-American people you don’t even know instead of talking to a person with an array of life experiences.

MT: I really get that. I got rid of my accent early on and oh, the confusion. So similarly, what do you wish people knew about folks with different abilities that you wish they would stop asking about or confusing?

PP: To be honest, just ask. In a very scientific way, it’s a medical condition. There are so many variables in every body. I have cerebral palsy, and what I can do as a person with cerebral palsy versus another person with cerebral palsy is completely different. Our set of abilities are completely different. So if you’re confused, personally, I don’t mind that you ask. And yeah, just don’t make assumptions as to what I can or cannot do.

I have a friend who is having a house party in Brooklyn next Saturday and he was so nervous, he didn’t know if he should ask me or not because his house is not exactly accessible. So and I was like, just tell me if you want me to come, ask me to come and just tell me what the situation is because I’ve been living with it for 20 years and I probably know how to solve this problem or get around it. It’s just problem solving. The situation is not as awkward as you might make it.

MT: Can you talk about job opportunities as related to accessibility?

PP: I think there’s still a lot of work in terms of accessibility in the theater field, and the lack of accessibility of the offices and backstage areas of theatres directly limits my job opportunities. I think the front of house is usually accessible, not because of anyone with disabilities, but because of senior citizens and the enforcement of the ADA. But in terms of like administrative offices, I think that it’s still difficult for them to imagine a person with any kind of disability will work here alongside them as equal. So the physical inaccessibility is just one manifestation of that. I’ve been in accessible offices before, and in there I still felt like I’m not welcomed and I’m disrupting their space. So like, it’s just a matter of the industry not being able to imagine us working alongside them.

MT: Can you talk about the workshop you mentioned earlier? And I know you’re doing a few internships as well.

PP: So the workshop that I’m doing is from Rising Circle Theater Collective, called INKtank. We’re given 12 weeks to develop a full play that we’ve already sent in. It will be presented with a reading at the end of the program. We will be partnered with a professional director of color and professional actors, and it’s really awesome. I don’t know how much I can say publicly, but I think Raquel [Almazan] and Monet [Hurst-Mendoza] have really successfully made it into a people of color’s space. Every theater says that they want to “do diversity,” but like, you know it’s still a White space, where people of color are put into the position to educate and to defend, and this space is clearly a space for people of color, where we get to lead and heal from the traumas of being in certain White spaces. Because it was the first meeting, we weren’t talking about plays. We were just talking about being a person of color in the theater industry, how to deal with it, and that this program, even after we finish it, we will still have it as a map or as a resource for these kind of things. It’s like the best thing ever.

MT: That’s amazing. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that before.

PP: Yeah.

MT: Although, Musical Theater Factory is pretty good at that. But yeah, it’s hard to come by. Can you talk about your internships?

PP: At The Play Company, I’m the literary specialist and I research about the plays that come by and I provide dramaturgical support whenever they need it, because I can, as someone who can speak Chinese, to provide translation support. I’m in my first week, so I don’t have much to share yet.

I also have an internship at PEN America, which is awesome. They’re really interesting and intelligent people doing really important jobs. My job there is as an administrator, and I enter a lot of membership info. They have the Free Expression program, which just released a report on Chinese media censorship, so I get to help out a lot with that just because I’m a person in my office who can read Chinese. I also get to go to really cool parties for writers–a lot of networking, a lot of international work, which I really like. They’re not an organization that is constantly promoting diversity as some sort of buzzword, but the diversity is just there, because they’re looking at the world, and the world of literature internationally, and nationally. They’re looking at the whole thing.

MT: Can you talk about Pan-Asian Rep? I know you were selected last year.

PP: I was selected for the 2017 Pan-Asian Rep NuWorks Festival. My ten minute play got chosen, and it was my college thesis in a way. The assignment was, in first semester of my senior year—although I didn’t really officially have a senior year—I was to be partnered with a professor, cast Marymount students, and put on a short play in the black box theater. So I did that. Then my director submitted my play to Pan-Asian Rep NuWorks Festival, and I got in.

I’m really glad that I was unusually vocal about the casting process when I did my casting at Marymount. I stood strong that I would hold an equitable audition, and cast students of color only, because they usually won’t do that. On the official casting call, it’s like, “We are open to considering all actors,” you know that way of thinking? All actors?

MT: Oh, yes.

PP: Yes. We did the play and it was supposed to be the end of it. I mean, we were lucky to have a great team of people, and to be able to receive a second production in a professional setting. And those two actors [I casted] are just phenomenal, [even though] they’re sophomores. So I’m really glad that when the play got accepted, I actually got to give the opportunity to those two actors of color who are sophomores, who are constantly underappreciated, to do a professional production before any of their classmates can get out there and do something.

MT: That’s amazing.

PP: So I’m very glad that I made that happen for them. Also, I don’t know if it’s related, but the actress in my production never got cast at Marymount, ever. But the semester following that production, she got cast. So…

MT: That’s amazing. Thank you so much for chatting with me.

&nbsp

Posted on April 5, 2018April 5, 2018 by admin

A Conversation with Andrea Prestinario and Royer Bockus of Ring of Keys

When Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron became the first all-female writing team to win Best Score at the Tony Awards, Tesori said: “You have to see it to be it.” Andrea Prestinario and Royer Bockus are hoping their new organization, Ring of Keys, will help queer women+, trans, and gender non-conforming artists be seen a whole lot more often both on and offstage. Ring of Keys seeks to help connect non-cisheterosexual theater professionals connect both with each other and with potential employers. At a time when so many theater companies are talking the talk about commitment to diversity, Ring of Keys is challenging the industry to move beyond lip service and start doing the work.

I talked to Andrea and Royer recently and they told me all about how Ring of Keys got started, where they’re going, and why Seven Brides for Seven Brothers is a problem.

Kelly Wallace: Tell me about Ring of Keys. Where did the idea come from? What motivated you to start it?

Royer Bockus: I think the story of how we met is basically the story of how the group got started. I was going to do a workshop of an opera that our mutual friend had written the music for. He said, “Oh, Royer, there’s another woman in the cast, she’s an actress and…she’s a lesbian.” Like, he whispered it.

Andrea Prestinario: I had the same experience of being whispered at with, “Andrea, I really want you to meet this girl who’s going to be in this reading with us, she’s a lesbian.”

Royer: And obviously Andrea has a partner, so it wasn’t about setting us up. He just really wanted us to know each other. What’s crazy is we get to the opera reading and we meet each other and we’re instantly friends and I’m like, “Did the music director tell you that I was a lesbian?” And she said yes and I said, “Oh, great! Well, I guess now we’re friends.” We realized, or at least I realized, that we don’t really know any other queer, female actresses in the community. Gay men have kajillions of people who are out and open and networking with each other and they’re very visible. We had the idea that we wanted to find all of us.

Andrea: We needed to find each other!

Royer: We needed to be organized and find a way to meet one another. It meant so much to me to meet Andrea. I just felt like I was alone, in a way, in the industry and that I was invisible.

Andrea: It feels like we’re the butt of gay mens’ jokes still? We’re not all one team; we’re still the joke. Even though he was kidding, there’s some implication there and we thought that we needed to join and merge and make our own club.

Royer: And so we did! After awhile of being just friends, we decided we were going to make our idea into a reality and that’s how we got here.

Kelly: Were there other specific moments in your career where someone made a joke or said something that made you aware of the discrimination that queer women face in this industry?

Andrea: I remember a moment of just being in a dressing room and coming out to the other women in my dressing room and they were like, “You can’t be gay, you’re too pretty!” I am straight-presenting and I think that’s also part of the issue in terms of having to come out again and again, obviously, but it being this idea that I felt alone in that world.

Royer: I think most of it for me, instead of outright discrimination, I didn’t feel represented in my industry. I remember completely losing my mind the first time I heard the soundtrack to Fun Home because I couldn’t believe that it was my story and my genre. I had never realized that those things had never met before. Also, I just didn’t know anybody else, or if I did, they weren’t out or were keeping it a secret. I felt like I had two identities, in a way: I had my work identity and my personal identity. One of the things that we hope, by creating this group, is that when we all see our collective queerness, and the industry sees our collective queerness, people will want to represent those stories onstage. The stage is one of our society’s pedestals for ideas and people, and we all know how important representation is. I know that’s what Stage & Candor is all about.

Andrea: I would add too that Ring of Keys is a collective for queer women, trans, and gender non-conforming artists working on and offstage in musical theater. We want to encompass everything under the umbrella of the queer spectrum that is not cis-men. When we see queerness onstage, they’re primarily cis-male narratives.

Kelly: Intersectionality is a big goal you’ve talked about for Ring of Keys; how do you plan to make sure transwomen and nonbinary people feel welcome, especially when there is a lot of trans-exclusive rhetoric in the cis-lesbian community?

Royer: I mean, I think the most important thing in that situation is to listen to their concerns and adapt to them. We can say all kinds of stuff about wanting to be inclusive and that we want to make sure you feel welcome here, but we need to listen to people. I hope that anyone would tell us if there were reasons they didn’t feel welcome.

Andrea: We also really look forward to having diversified leadership in the future, as our organization grows. We understand that as much as we try, there’s just a perspective that we don’t have. We are absolutely anti trans-exclusive radical feminism. We are not interested in anything that excludes trans and non-binary people.

Royer: We’re definitely striving to make space for marginalized voices within our own queer community, and we look forward to a leadership that isn’t just three cis women.

Kelly: What has the reaction been so far since you’ve launched?

Royer: It’s mostly been overwhelmingly positive from folks who have been seeking and needing this kind of collective. Everyone who has signed up to be a member has been looking for this and their responses in their applications have said so.

I had a gay friend who was concerned it would be anti-guys, and I found that to be an interesting comment because we’re making space and asking to have a seat at the table. Gay men set the table. There are all kinds of other humans that are under that queer spectrum, and those narratives aren’t being told. You want those stories onstage but you also want to see queer leadership off the stage as well.

Kelly: Why did you decide to go with the name “Ring of Keys”?

Royer: “Ring of Keys” is a song from the musical Fun Home. It refers to a moment in the character Young Allison’s life when she sees a woman in a diner who is basically like old school butch lesbian, and she has this moment where she recognizes something in herself in that person. It helps her to understand her own identity and grow into it. I think most queer people who you talk to will speak to the truth of this song. It’s so affirming to see yourself in someone else, to feel like you’re not alone in the world. That’s the goal of the organization. We want to be visible so young artists can look at us and think they can do this—they can be in musical theater. It’s really hard to see yourself in musical theater sometimes.

Kelly: It feels like it’s almost…not for you, on some level.

Royer: I used to wish when I did shows that I could put some sort of asterisk or indicator in the program that I was queer because I know how much it would’ve meant to me as a kid and see there’s somebody like me.

Andrea: I also have a friend who’s a very butch, gay woman in her 60s, and when I told her about Ring of Keys, she was so taken by it. She told me about how she used to see shows all the time and thought about doing musical theater. She said, “But I would go see musicals and nobody looked like me.” And so she thought it wasn’t for her. That breaks my heart. You have to see it to be it. She didn’t see her story, or anyone that looked like her, and so she went in another direction.

Another thing was when we did a Stage & Candor interview about two years ago, you had asked me why I thought we weren’t in musical theater, and I thought, maybe because our stories aren’t being told. It seems obvious when we think about it through that lens.

Kelly: The offstage representation is something I think a lot about. There are so few trans, NB, queer roles available, and there are mostly cisheterosexual men and women playing those roles. You wish that wasn’t true and that more people got to play “themselves.”

Royer: I think that any time somebody plans to profit artistically or financially from a character who is trans, nonbinary, queer, those people should get the opportunity to play that role. Those characters are never onstage, or so rarely onstage, and now that they are starting to be, the idea that we would cast somebody else in those roles, to me, is unfortunate and wrong.

Kelly: One thing I do want to talk about is the discourse around shows like Carousel, My Fair Lady, and Kiss Me Kate, which are all returning to Broadway. Are they sexist? Is it a good idea to produce these shows right now? What’s the line? A lot of older shows don’t align with our goals of representation and equality now.

Royer: I don’t see the value anymore in putting museum pieces onstage. If I’m going to see an older piece of our canon, I need to see it through an intersectional feminist lens. I thought Sweet Charity at the Signature did that well. I left that production thinking there is a future for musical theater and there is a future that doesn’t just completely throw away our canon. You can perform old pieces of theater through a lens that demonstrates either how far we’ve come or how far we haven’t come, but I’m not a fan of putting up “purist” revivals that don’t really say anything about the gender politics or racial politics within them. It’ll depend on what these productions do with themselves. If they put women at the forefront of the stories, if they are produced in a way that highlights that, and doesn’t make things sugary and sweet for old school audiences, put that onstage. If it’s behind a piece of museum glass, I’m not interested anymore, personally.

Andrea: I had a conversation with a casting director in a casting director session and we were talking about the musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. They’re doing it in their season because their audiences demand it. I think we need put more impetus on the chokehold theaters say they’re in with their audiences. Are you sure they “demand” it? I think we’re not exposing them enough to know that. They’re smarter than that. They just can’t know what they don’t know. His comment was about how he would have a hard time with that show “in this day and age,” it’s an example of raising consciousness. He finally looked at a musical and saw women abducted and taken against their consent and saw that was not okay.

Kelly: It’s honestly a terrible show.

Royer: And if you still want to do it, you need to navigate that. Our current consciousness is not going to be okay with that. And it’s so great that we are having these conversations and saying like, yeah, this is troubling. I just want to see that continue and for all of us to constantly have this lens. I don’t want it to be that you can’t do it because of the #MeToo movement right now and you’re going to do it next summer. It’s not okay. It’s just not okay.

Kelly: I think that’s a valid fear that a lot of women have, that this moment is temporary and things will regress to what they were before.

Andrea: There’s a fear that it’s just a trend, but we’re pushing the needle. We can never go back.

Kelly: I think my concern with something like Carousel, the creative team is pretty much all cis white men.

Royer: You can put my groaning in the interview if you want. [laughter]

Kelly: It’s just so hard to trust the idea of these shows when the same people are in charge who have always been in charge.

Royer: That Sweet Charity I described was directed by Leigh Silverman, who is a queer woman. I didn’t know that when I saw it and was experiencing it, and afterwards I thought, of course. Queer women were at the table; queer women were running the ship.

Andrea: Consider the fact that so much of the Golden Age was written by men. Why are most women written in that time period just virgins or mothers? The female perspective and experience wasn’t there.

Kelly: And all of this goes back to what you’re doing with Ring of Keys.

Andrea: It’s the intersection of queerness and musical theater and not being a white cis man.

Kelly: What else do you see in the future for the organization?

Andrea: I think the future is unknown, in terms of what potential Ring of Keys has. We’re twofold in our mission. One is to build a community and two is for it to be a hiring resource.

Kelly: It’s great that beyond just having this online network, you’re also committed to having in-person events and bringing people together that way. What kind of things will you guys be doing?

Royer: Well, we started with just gathering, which I think is really important. We got to know each other and learn what we’re doing as artists and activists in our own communities. I think of Ring of Keys as a community center. I think it would be great in the future to have readings of people’s work, to go see theater together, to organize politically and artistically. Ring of Keys is the building in which to do that, both online and in-person.

We’re looking to produce events too that showcase our members in concert, in cabarets, and in workshops.

Kelly: How would you explain to someone why Ring of Keys is important if we want to make change?

Andrea: To me, it’s like, just think of how much it would mean to other people for you to be public about your identity in this industry.

Royer: This is our diversity; it’s an asset we bring to the theater world. It’s exciting to make room at the table for these stories and drive opportunities for these artists. I think that this is an opportunity to, as we put it, kick-ball-change open the closet door and reveal a vibrant, new musical theater landscape.

If you are a queer women+, trans, or gender non-conforming artist and would like to apply to be a key, you can find more information at www.ringofkeys.org.