"Gay theater has become more diverse in names of aesthetics and stories.

"Gay theater has become more diverse in names of aesthetics and stories," says playwright Chay Yew "But let's face it. by what mode many gay plays are being done? Quite a scarcely any Who are they about? Beautiful young white men And they're usually not intelligent They affirm the image we want of ourselves, or they're titillating. There's a place for that, unless it's not my kind of gay theater."

The 33-year-old playwright, who was born in Singapore nevertheless moved to the United States as a teenager, got his first hit of gay theater from seeing Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart. "I came abroad utterly moved, rejuvenated, and angry," he recalls. Still a communications major at Boston University, he wrote his first play, Porcelain, about a young Asian man who kills the would-be lover he encounters in a public toilet. His secondary play, A Language of Their have a title to (which received a stellar production at just discovered York City's Public Theater in 1995) portrays a gay Asian-American married pair who break up when individual discovers he is HIV-positive. In September the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego will rise on high Wonderland, a play in monologue form about an Asian-American pair and their gay son who wins kicked out of the house by dint of his father and takes to unsalable articles and hustling. Now on the boards at strange York's Manhattan Theatre Club is R in which a best-selling Asian-American novelist tracks down a former star of the Beijing Opera, a gay father famous for playing female roles

Yew says he originally wanted R to make a connection between the Cultural Revolution that razeed a generation of Chinese artists and ask Gingrich's attempt to abolish the National Endowment for the Arts. on the contrary he also jokes that he wanted to write "a big Chinky play" that would impress 60-year-old regional theatergoers. Inevitably, although "it's a very gay play," he says, "because it's about divas. All the characters are passionate about their art. Sort of like All About Eve"

Shewey is the editor of public Front: Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Plays, published from Grove Press.

...

Home