Yew, Chay (1967– )
Born and raised in Singapore, playwright and di-
rector Chay Yew came to America at the age of 16
to study at Pepperdine University in 1982. There-
after, he went on to Boston University for a Master
of Science degree. As director of the Mark Taper
Forum’s Asian Theatre Workshop in Los Angeles
since 1995, resident director at Los Angeles’s East
West Players, and artistic director of Northwest
Asian American Theatre in Seattle, Yew has re-
ceived many awards and grants, becoming one of
the most outstanding Asian Americans on the na-
tional and international stage. In 1995 Asian Week
listed Yew among the 50 leading Asian Americans.
In his works, Yew attempts to move beyond
embedded stereotypes of Asian Americans. In-
stead, he offers a theatre that poses questions
about the complexities of Asian-Americans’
struggles to negotiate their identities and to sur-
vive in America. A distinguishing characteristic
of Yew’s plays is the poetic, sensual language and
witty diction found in the characters’ dialogues
and monologues that are often extended. His first
play, As If He Hears (1988), was banned in Singa-
pore because of its positive depiction of a homo-
sexual character, which the government perceived
as inappropriate to societal values. Yew’s ground-
breaking work, Porcelain, won London’s 1992
prestigious Fridge Award for Best Play. Porcelain
depicts a young British-Chinese man shooting
his lover in a public restroom, unsettling expec-
tations of the model minority myth, and bring-
ing to bear the power politics of race, gender, and
sex in interracial relationships. Breaking taboos
in writing about sexuality and violence, Porce-
lain anticipates the reform in the British Sexual
Offences (Amendment) Bill in 1994. A Language
of Their Own premiered at the New York Shake-
speare Festival and won Gay and Lesbian Alli-
ance Against Defamation’s Best Play of 1995. Set
in Boston, this play depicts the intimacies of two
Asian Americans and their break-up after one of
them discovers he is HIV-positive. Significantly,
this play crystallizes the human and social com-
ponents of illness and relationships between pa-
tient and partners, dramatizing the implications
of health and sickness.
The Hyphenated American (2002) is a collec-
tion of four plays. Red (1998) traces the journey of
an Asian-American author in search of her father,
who used to perform female roles in the Beijing
Opera. Wonderland (1999) presents the conflicts
and travails of an Asian-American family. Scissors
(2000) sketches the intercultural affinities between
two septuagenarians—an Asian and a Caucasian
American—in 1929. A Beautiful Country (1998),
first presented in Los Angeles, is a multimedia
production in which aspects of citizenship, com-
munity, diaspora, and memory are examined. A
Beautiful Country mobilizes the figure of an im-
migrant drag queen Miss Visa Denied to displace
conventional modes of representation and to stage
a tapestry of Asian-American immigrant history
between 1871 and 1998.
Yew’s works are never merely about sex or sexu-
ality. Rather, they provoke us to critically rethink
how race and the regulation of sexuality refract
off notions of home and nation, racial and sexual
identifications, and cultural and patriarchal anxi-
eties. By focusing on transnational labor, cultural
mobility, and the contradictory practices of Asian
Americans, Yew raises questions about class, ethi-
cal choices, and complicity in global capitalism.
Yew’s earlier plays attend to themes of whiteness,
cultural belonging, interiority, and sexuality; in
recent plays, however, Yew seems to shift his focus
to reconsidering the future of the gay community,
establishing affiliations across color and gender
lines, examining aging and poverty, and tracking
Asian immigrant history in relation to the larger
context of America. In Question 27, Question 28
(2003), Yew documents the many constituencies
and struggles of Japanese-American female in-
ternees of World War II by drawing on historical
archives and interviews. In A Distant Shore (2005),
a play set in a Southeast Asian rubber plantation
in the 1920s, Yew undertakes the political project
of remapping new geographies of characters and
places. In Home: Places Between Asia and Amer-
ica (1998), his multicultural adaptation of Fed-
erico García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba
(2000), Yew shows his ongoing interest in, and
commitment to, carving out complicated char-
acters, exploring the interface between the localYew, Chay 337