Drumming Up Success

Rick Shiomi is sitting straight-backed in a metal chair in the basement of a Northeast Minneapolis office building. The fifty-nine-year-old speaks softly and purposefully, as if his mind’s velocity is programmed for peak performance: even-keeled, focused, and pragmatic. When excited, he does not raise his voice. He is self-confident, serene, welcoming. Shiomi is the artistic director of Mu Performing Arts, one of the country’s premier Asian-American theater companies. He is, in other words, a very busy man.

In 1990, Shiomi, who is a third-generation Japanese Canadian, visited Minneapolis to speak to colleges about Asian-American theater. It was then that he met his future wife, Martha Johnson, a theater professor at Augsburg College and an authority on Japanese Noh theater. After traveling between Minneapolis and Canada for almost two years, Shiomi settled here, drawn by the vital theater scene and the love of his life.

In 1992, Johnson and Shiomi, along with Korea-born University of Minnesota student Dong-Il Lee, founded Theater Mu, an organization devoted to Asian-American theater. The word mu (pronounced “moo”) has multiple meanings. The company uses the Korean pronunciation of the Chinese ideogram for the shaman/ artist/warrior who connects the heavens to the earth through the tree of life.

Starting an Asian-American theater company in the Midwest was a risky venture. Five years earlier, the Asian-American playwright Philip Kan Gotanda received a McKnight fellowship from The Playwrights’ Center, but left after completing the first half of his fellowship, pointing out that there were no Asian-American actors in town to do his plays or other Asian- American theater artists with whom to share ideas.

Nevertheless, Mu got off to an auspicious start, debuting at the Southern Theater with scenes from David Henry Hwang’s FOB. (Hwang is now considered the preeminent Asian-American dramatist in the United States.) Also in that first season, Lee wrote and directed scenes from his work-in-progress Mask Dance: Journey Within. Community reaction was positive, so the threesome continued to nurture their fledgling company.

A year after Mu was formed, Shiomi stepped into his current position and has been the face of the Midwest’s foremost Pan-Asian–American theater ever since. In addition to producing three full-length shows a year, the organization also presents an annual Mu Daiko concert. Daiko (also spelled “taiko”) means “drum” in Japanese. Daiko is a contemporary version of an ancient percussive art form that uses complex rhythms, dynamic choreography, and tremendous athleticism to create a performance unlike anything Western culture has produced. Watch Shiomi bang on an enormous drum, and it’s clear that this outwardly composed man possesses almost superhuman strength and endurance—qualities that come in handy in his line of work.

By 1997, he was choreographing and teaching daiko to Mu devotees. Currently, the Mu Daiko ensemble is comprised of twelve members, all of whom trained with Shiomi. “We are [now] equal parts theater and daiko,” he says. “That makes us unique in North America and kind of in the world to do both at this level of intensity.” Last year, the organization changed its name from Theater Mu to Mu Performing Arts to reflect its dual roles. This month, Mu and St. Paul’s SteppingStone Theatre for Youth Development are producing the world premiere of Shiomi’s Journey of the Drum: A Taiko Fable. Set in ancient Japan, the play focuses on a young girl’s secret desire to play daiko, which was traditionally a men’s-only activity. (Mu’s real-life daiko group is almost entirely women.)
Mu is best known for making theater that blends Asian and Western artistic forms. It finds new ways to tell Asian folktales that connect immigrants to their native cultures and produces new work that speaks to and reflects third- and fourth-generation Pan-Asians, many of whom don’t feel a connection to traditional ethnic activities. By opening up that dialogue, Mu gives all Twin Citians something rarely seen on American stages: stories about Asian Americans told from their own point of view.

Shiomi is one of those offspring who wasn’t feeling the connection. He was looking for people who had ties to their native heritage, but who weren’t interested in Japanese classical dance, bonsai cultivation, or other traditional activities. In other words, he was searching for people like himself. In his late twenties, he saw a daiko group perform. Soon after, he joined groups in Vancouver and then in San Francisco, and became ensconced in the growing Pan-Asian theater community.

While working in Vancouver in 1980, Shiomi showed fellow playwrights Hwang and Gotanda one of his short stories. Gotanda encouraged Shiomi to flesh out the piece, and it eventually morphed into Shiomi’s first play. The 1983 Off–Broadway run of Shiomi’s Yellow Fever was produced by New York’s Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, and subsequently by theaters in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Tokyo. It is Shiomi’s most widely produced play.

Yellow Fever is an old-fashioned detective story that was important, says Hwang, because it “introduced an Asian-Canadian sensibility to North America.” The success of Yellow Fever cemented Shiomi’s reputation as a formidable artist in the Asian-American theater community, and he began forging ahead with what would become his life’s work. Says Hwang, “Rick has found his ideal home at Mu. He is not only a great artist, but also a great supporter and inspirer of other artists. He has in some sense a social vision, which brings together individuals to create new worlds.”

Thanks to Shiomi’s dedication to his company, in 2006 the New York City–based nonprofit organization Theatre Communications Group awarded Mu a New Generations career development grant. The purpose of the grant, says TCG artistic programs director Emilya Cachapero, is to retain younger artists in the theater as they face increasing financial instability and to ensure that there are properly prepared up-and-coming theater artists “who will be able to hold key positions of leadership in the field,” such as artistic directorships.

Courtesy of the TCG grant, for the next two years local actor and director Randy Reyes will learn the ins and outs of Mu Performing Arts and, one hopes, apply those skills later in his career. For Reyes, thirty-four, his position as artistic and producing associate means he has more on his plate than acting. He will run Mu’s annual play-development program New Eyes Festival and direct some of Mu’s main-stage productions.

“I’ve been artistic director for almost thirteen years,” says Shiomi. “I’m not looking at doing another twenty here, but I want the opportunity to share all of my experience. It’s not necessarily that Randy will take over.” Jack Reuler of Mixed Blood, Lou Bellamy of Penumbra, and the artistic directors of other leading theater companies won’t be around forever, Shiomi warns, and the Twin Cities theater community will need people to take their place. To that end, the TCG grant provides Reyes with a salary and pays off some of his student-loan debt, to give Reyes—and Mu—time to grow without financial pressure.

Reyes, a Filipino American whose first language is Tagalog, also runs acting workshops at Mu. “It’s very interesting to work with these young Asian-American actors,” says Reyes, his English perfect. “For a lot of them, English is a second language. In [mainstream] acting classes, the language barrier is not dealt with. I didn’t realize it was such a burden for Asian-American actors—things like syntax and where to put emphasis. It creates insecurity. Having an Asian-American instructor enables this conversation to happen.”

This month, Reyes directs his first show for Mu, a revival of the company’s 1999 hit, Circle Around the Island, in the Guthrie’s Dowling Studio. It’s a coming-of-age story, told using Hawaiian music and hula-inspired movement, about a boy whose father dies.

Reyes is fortunate he was introduced to the Twin Cities via an acting job with the Guthrie (he moved here from New York). Otherwise, he says, it would have been harder to get roles because of his ethnicity. “How many times have you seen an Asian Willy Loman?” he says.

For Jeany Park, a Korean Canadian, Mu has been an indispensable resource. In 2003, Mu produced Falling Flowers, her play about the World War II–ravaged Korean comfort women. This past January, the History Theatre produced 100 Men’s Wife, Park’s play about a Chinese woman who immigrated to Minnesota in 1920s. “Mu was one of the first theaters I worked with when I moved here,” she says. “With Mu, every season I could pretty much count on a role being available for me.” In addition to acting with Mu, she performed with the Guthrie in last year’s The Falls and will be in its upcoming Boats on a River. She says that because the Guthrie’s associate artistic director, John Miller-Stephany, saw her perform with Mu every year, he saw her work progress. Reyes, Park, and others remain the exception for Asian-American actors here, however, not the rule.

The dynamics are changing slowly, but, says Reyes, “it’s also very important for Asian-American playwrights and theater artists to make work about themselves and specifically for themselves.” That being said, Mu’s audiences are, on average, 70 percent white, which speaks to both Mu’s successes—blending Asian and Western art forms in a unique way—and its obstacles—getting its target audience, Asian Americans, into seats.

According to 2005 census data, approximately 4.3 percent of the nation’s population are Asian-American, making them the third largest minority group in the country. The Twin Cities has one of the largest concentrations of Asian Americans in the interior of the country. As interactions with Asian Americans increasingly have become a part of everyday life, directors are becoming more comfortable casting Asian-American actors in major (read: typically “white”) roles. But the days of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly are not far behind us. As recently as 1991, Jonathan Pryce, who is white, headlined Miss Saigon, the Broadway adaptation of Butterfly, wearing bronzer and eye prostheses to make himself look Vietnamese.

When the professional actors’ union, Actors’ Equity Association, got wind of the casting decision, thousands of actors, Asian and otherwise, protested. According to Shiomi, Pryce’s name had marquee value—he’d played the same part in London with great success—and the promise of box office gold trumped political correctness. Pryce was excellent in the role and won a Tony for his performance. The good news is that when he left the cast of Miss Saigon, Broadway producers suddenly “discovered” hundreds of Asian- American actors who were capable of playing the part.

That Miss Saigon—as well as the recent Broadway revivals of Flower Drum Song and Pacific Overtures—generated mass interest (and millions of dollars in ticket sales) is further proof that Asian Americans and their stories are firmly ensconced within American culture.

Shiomi surveys Mu’s rehearsal room, looking tenderly at the daiko drums and plywood scenery pieces corralled in a dim corner. The only way for Mu to go is forward, and there is much work to be done. “I’m an optimist,” Shiomi says. He laughs softly, with characteristic understatement. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here.” 

For information on Journey of the Drum (March 2–22) or Circle Around the Island (March 3–18), call 612-824-3396 or visit muperformingarts.org.

Jaime Kleiman is theater columnist for Mpls.St.Paul Magazine.