Zac Efron: two-time winner of the MTV Movie Award for “best shirtless performance,” four-time nominee and two-time Teen Choice “Male Hottie” winner, CinemaCon Comedy Star of the Year, and Golden Raspberry nominee for Worst Actor of 2018: what does he have to do with Asians? (Or Gaysians?)
Rhee initially resisted. He was dead set on producing an all-Asian Our Town as Token’s first play. “I am a classics/canon fiend,” he says. “If I could do Shakespeare all the time, I would. You will not find anyone who loves Death of a Salesman more than me!” He cites a 2015 National Asian American Theater Company production of Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing! at the Public Theater in New York as a revelatory influence. “They were playing a Jewish family, and not one person in the audience went, ‘Wait a minute!’ They accepted it! Then Hamilton happened. [Our Town] would be a political statement—you keep on saying we don’t belong here.”
Rhee also cites the 2019 Wrightwood 659 exhibition “About Face: Stonewall, Revolt and New Queer Art” as crucial inspiration. “The artists took what was grotesque and made it beautiful. It was a celebration: ‘This is who I am, you’ve made fun of it, I’m going to embrace it. I’m going to make it into art.’ I remember thinking at that moment: ‘This is what it’s like for me to be Asian in America.’ Here, Zac Efron becomes the ideal, everything these two characters are not. One is comfortable saying, ‘I’m not him and I don’t want to be him!’ And the other one says, ‘I’m not him, and the closest I can get is by dating Zac Efron.’ What am I not because I don’t represent this idea? Or, perhaps, what are you?” v
Streaming via YouTube Thu 11/12 and Sat 11/14, 7:30 PM CST, tokentheatre.net, F.
