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.

The date was July 1999. The place was the rec room of a condo complex in the San Fernando Valley. And the occasion was the first meeting of a new Asian American theater company. It was three fellow artists—Chil, Tim and Bokyun—and myself who had called this meeting. We had been a part of The Society of Heritage Performers, a Korean American theater company founded by veteran actor Soon-Tek Oh, but felt it was now time to expand. We not only wanted to create a place for all Asian American artists and others who were down with our cause, but also focus on the type of work you rarely saw Asian Americans doing then—work that was “edgy” and provocative.

Roger was concerned about how serious we really were about doing what we were saying we would do; that we weren’t just going to be a redux of what we had been before. We did our best to reassure him. And if he didn’t necessarily walk away from that first meeting completely sold on the vision, he stuck with it and a month later was cast in our first show—a strange, little play about two brothers and a college student who comes to live with them. The play was Texas by Judy Soo Hoo and it was the perfect show for our newly formed company, now and forever known as Lodestone Theatre Ensemble, to make our debut with.

"Texas" with Ryun Yu and Roger Fan

When I say we wanted to try to do the type of work Asian Americans weren’t doing back then, we weren’t trying to reject what others had previously done. The plays that came before us usually dealt with more “traditional” issues like immigration, the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II, cultural assimilation and identity. We felt we didn’t have to re-tread those issues. We were young and proud to be Asian American and wanted that reflected in our work. But we were just as influenced by The Brady Bunch or Steven Spielberg movies or hip-hop and we wanted those influences to be there too. Why did we have to always limit ourselves to work where our Asian American-ness had to be explained or justified? Like white artists, why couldn’t we just do whatever we wanted? Hell, if white people could put on “yellow face” and play Asians, we should have the freedom to do the same in reverse. That was the idea behind Lodestone (even down to our name which deliberately has no Asian connotation).

So for the past ten years that’s what we’ve been doing. I’ll be the first to say we’ve had our fair share of “artistic failures” but when we’ve failed, it was always because we wanted to push ourselves and try something different and interesting. And that certainly made those early years more challenging. The more traditionally minded Asians didn’t think we were Asian enough. White people were confused that we weren’t doing plays about Chinese railroad workers or Vietnamese boat people.

Let me give you an example. Our second production was a play I wrote entitled laughter joy & loneliness & sex & sex & sex & sex. The title pretty much tells you about the show’s content which contained, among other things, simulated sex (both oral and regular), masturbation and long and graphic discussions about sex including an extended sequence where three of the characters talk about all the famous women they wanted to fuck. I had never seen an Asian American play that dealt with sex directly and honestly and I wanted this one to make up for that neglect.

Up to this point, our biggest funders were a group of Korean American businesspeople and they were not happy with what they saw. They told us they would only support us if we didn’t do “pornographic” plays like this again. We really needed their money, but no way we were going to let them dictate what we could or couldn’t do. So good-bye, Korean sugar daddies! The mainstream press also slammed us. As the writer, I took the brunt of the critical hatred. But the funny thing was, none of these people were actually reviewing the play itself. They were instead focusing on things they found objectionable in the content. The critic from one of the big L.A. newspapers basically spent her review reprimanding me for doing a play about Asian Americans that was graphic and had messy sex and dirty talk and all those things Asians obviously didn’t do in real life (that review actually helped us because people read that and came to see the show expecting to see two hours of hot Asian men and women fucking).

But that show became a hit—still one of our biggest ever. Why? Because young Asian Americans came to it. I look back at my work on that play and I cringe now at all I did wrong in it, but the production spoke directly to our peers; our core audience. It was a play about issues they were dealing with in their own lives. People who had never gone to a play before or had never personally identified with what was out there, saw themselves on stage. And we’ve continued to strive for that.

Now, here we are ten years later and much has changed. We’ve not only survived but thrived so it was a surprise to many of our supporters when we announced a couple of years ago that our tenth season would be our last and we would shut down Lodestone for good. It wasn’t a decision we made for economic reasons or because we were burned out. It was purely an artistic choice. We felt that in our current incarnation, we had pretty much achieved all we could and why not stop when you feel you’re on top? Why repeat ourselves and eventually see the quality of our work start to slide? Why not go out with a bang?

As I write this, we are exactly one week and one day away from the opening night of our very last production—a new play I wrote entitled Grace Kim & The Spiders From Mars. On a personal level, I wanted to do something neither Lodestone or I had ever done before—a romantic comedy. But I also wrote this specifically to serve as Lodestone’s final show. It’s filled with references to our past (including a nod to every single production we’ve ever done) and what I hope is a reflection of who and what we were. I wanted every line and action to be embodied with Lodestone’s spirit.

It’s a play about love and family and passion and beginnings and endings and not being afraid of taking a leap of faith to try to achieve something grand and magical. It’s a play about all the things we’ve tried to create and embrace these past ten years. And if the theater gods are smiling down upon us favorably, it will be a fitting end to an unforgettable journey.

Dec 2008: Celebrating our tenth and final season kick-off with friends and colleagues.