Ten years ago on this date, we were about to start the second week of rehearsals for Terminus Americana, the new play that would kick-off the third season for Lodestone Theatre Ensemble, which was the Asian American theater company I had co-founded in 1999 and was co-Artistic Director of. Then 9/11 happened and, as it did for everyone else, our world changed.
We cancelled that night’s rehearsal and future rehearsals until further notice. At that moment, putting on a play didn’t seem important anymore. But over the next couple of days, we realized that we had to make a decision. Terminus Americana was scheduled to open in late October—we only had a month-and-a-half to put the show together so if we were going to do it, we had to start asap.
Already, our nation’s leaders were talking about the importance of Americans getting back to their normal routines so there was no doubt that we’d get back to doing what we did—producing plays. But the problem here was with Terminus Americana itself. The play, written by my talented writer friend Matt Pelfrey, told the story of Mac, a normal workingman who survives an office shooting that leaves most of his colleagues dead. Before the shooter (played by my fellow Offender Roger Fan) kills himself, he whispers a “secret” into Mac’s ear, which sets him off on a journey across a mythical America to find the answers behind this violent act. It was a play about America and violence, about how violence had become a sort of religion in the U.S., and how worshipping and feeding into that religion of violence would eventually come back to haunt us.
What I remember most from that very first meeting ten years ago was a young actor (and now fellow Offender) named Roger Fan challenging us in the way that only Roger Fan can.
Since my brain’s too fried to write a proper entry today, I’m going to just plug the latest show that Lodestone, my theater company, is putting up. It’s an all-Asian American revival of a 1989 classic musical revue entitled 
