{"id":38746,"date":"2014-12-08T04:01:43","date_gmt":"2014-12-08T04:01:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=38746"},"modified":"2014-12-08T20:38:51","modified_gmt":"2014-12-08T20:38:51","slug":"transforming-three-sisters-a-hapa-family-in-chekhovs-modern-classic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=38746","title":{"rendered":"Transforming Three Sisters: A Hapa Family in Chekhov\u2019s Modern Classic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Transforming <\/strong><\/em>Three Sisters<\/strong>: A Hapa Family in Chekhov\u2019s Modern Classic<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies<\/a>
\nVolume 3 (2012): Special Issue: Mixed Heritage Asian American Literature<\/a>
\npages 130-146<\/p>\n

Elizabeth Liang<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cAll right, let\u2019s agree that this town is backward and vulgar, and let\u2019s suppose now that out of all its thousands of \u00a0inhabitants there are only three people like you\u2026 But you won\u2019t simply disappear; you will have some influence. And after you\u2019ve gone there will be six more, let\u2019s say, like you, then twelve, and so on, until finally people like you will be in the majority. In two or three hundred years, life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful, astonishing.\u201d (Vershinin in Act I of Three Sisters<\/em><\/a> by Anton Chekhov<\/a>, translated by Paul Schmidt<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is an act of courage or foolhardiness to produce theatre in the heart of the film world, depending on your point of view and how large the houses turn out to be. In the fall of 2005, I produced Three Sisters<\/em> in a 60-seat theatre in Burbank, California<\/a> (home of Disney and Warner Brothers). The odds were stacked even higher against the show\u2019s success when my assistant producer and I stipulated that the main characters, the upper-class and highly educated Russian Prozorov siblings, had to be played by Hapa<\/a> actors. I chose to foreground mixed heritage Asians because I am Hapa and wanted to see something akin to my own family on stage. The play had never been cast this way anywhere according to my research. Meanwhile, I assumed that our audience would be largely European American, because that is usually the case whenever I attend the theatre. Thus it was difficult to predict if this production would spark any interest in the average L.A.<\/a> theatregoer, since people tend to flock toward stories to which they can relate. I hoped that they would be intrigued by our unusual \u201ctake\u201d on a play with which they were likely familiar (as it is one of Chekhov\u2019s most popular works), but I also worried that they would feel the ethnic \u201clayering\u201d was forced and unnatural, or that we were trying to teach them something they had no interest in learning. My reasons for casting the siblings as Hapa were manifold:<\/p>\n