Chatting with Playwright Lauren Yee

With Lauren Yee at Urbanite Theatre

I was alternately thrilled and nervous at the prospect of interviewing playwright Lauren Yee for Urbanite Theatre's Modern Works Festival. Sure, I've interviewed plenty of people. But having a live audience ratchets it up a bit. And then there's the fact that Lauren is winning awards right and left for her work. My fears were assuaged the moment I met her. She is smart, articulate, generous, and funny.  Here are a few highlights from our chat.

--Lauren always knew she wanted to be a writer, but she landed upon the idea of playwriting in a surprising way. She was in high school at a time when families shared not only computers but email addresses. (As she said, you can determine exactly how old she is if you do the math.) One night she was checking her father's email to see if anyone was trying to get in touch with her. She stumbled upon a notice sent to her dad about a play competition with a deadline of midnight that very day. "I can do that," she thought. And she could. Although she says the play was terrible, it was a winner in the competition.  A career was launched.

Lauren with Urbanite founders and co-artistic directors Brendan Ragan and Summer Dawn Wallace

--Some of Lauren's work is semi-autobiographical, and she has terrific backstories to go with it.  The Great Leap, for instance, was inspired by her father's basketball "career."  Growing up, she remembers her dad being pretty good in the neighborhood pick-up game. At 6'1, he routinely found himself playing center.  But there's a big difference between a neighborhood pick-up game and playing at a national level.

In the 1980s, her father was part of a team of Chinese-American players that headed to Beijing to play in the American Friendship Games. Lauren had the audience doubled over laughing at the visuals.  Her father squared off in one game against a 7'6 player with the build of a Sumo wrestler. Yes, he had 15 inches on Mr. Yee and was half again his body weight. Team USA did not fare well. Lauren remembers her father saying they couldn't even see when the guy had the ball, much less defend against him.

In The Great Leap, Lauren uses the American Friendship Games as a jumping off point to explore issues such as what it was like for the American team members to find themselves in an environment both strangely familiar and totally unfamiliar. To hear Lauren talk about the play in an interview for Steppenwolf Theatre, click here.  And if you're in the area, don't miss The Great Leap when it hits the stage at Asolo Rep this spring.

Yee is one of the writers for a TV adaptation of the novel "Pachinko"

--We all knew Lauren is an accomplished playwright. What we didn't know is that she's expanded her work into writing for television.  The first show -- premiering on Netflix in 2020 -- is called Soundtrack. It's described on Netflix' website as a "romantic musical drama following the love stories connecting an eclectic group of people in modern-day Los Angeles." In each episode, there's a moment when a character suddenly breaks into song. (Lauren didn't reveal the song featured in the episode she wrote.)  So be on the look-out for that.

Even more exciting (to me) is an adaptation of the novel Pachinko by Min Jin Lee for the yet-to-be-launched Apple TV. Lauren's strong interest in history and family made her a natural choice as part of the writers' room.

For those who haven't read the book, it tells the story of four generations of a Korean family whose members live in Korea and Japan. Among other things, Lauren about talked the amount of research that goes into every element of the high budget TV show. The history of colonialism that's packed into the rice the characters eat is pretty astonishing. When Korea was a colony of Japan, Korea's rice production was sent to the mother country to feed its residents. Korean citizens ate millet, barley and corn. It's seemingly small details like this that will give the series its authenticity.

As to what makes the idea of the occasional foray into TV interesting, Lauren talked about the fun of sitting in a room with other writers and the showrunner and hashing out ideas. Playwrighting can be a lonely process. (Interestingly, we learned Lauren's "office" is actually the coffee shops of New York. She feeds off the commotion of the City and its residents.)

To give you a sense of Lauren the person, I'll close by sharing her answer to a question about the advice she'd give to young playwrights. She didn't hesitate before saying, "Be kind."