The first play that Lauren Yee ever wrote took no more than a day to finish. She was only a teenager and it was only a 10-minute play, but still: Her habits as an artist have evolved considerably since.
Her latest work, “Mother Russia,” a raucous comedy with a dark political center, gestated fitfully for nine long years from its festival beginnings in 2017 in Steamboat Springs, Colo., to its current, lauded Off Broadway form. In between came the industry shutdown of 2020-21 and — during a workshop of the play shortly before its premiere last March in Seattle — a crisis of confidence in which she mercilessly cut the title character from the script, because she thought it might help. It did the opposite, and she swiftly reinstated the role.
“I’m a very iterative writer,” Yee said the other afternoon at Signature Theater in Manhattan, where “Mother Russia” opened on Monday. “I go through lots and lots of drafts.” Also, she added: “I’m not a precious person.” She just wants whatever is best for the play.
Yee, 40, calls “Mother Russia” a “post-Soviet buddy comedy”: the story of Dmitri and Evgeny, a pair of 20-something doofuses in 1992 St. Petersburg, who are totally unprepared for the new capitalist culture they find themselves inhabiting.
Their childhood dreams of whom they’d become were shaped by the communism that was the law of the land all their lives until it wasn’t — a development that’s left them floundering. They spend their days running a weird little shop that’s really just a front for a Soviet-style surveillance operation with a single target: a pop-star defector who has returned home. Gazing down on all of it is the astringent Mother Russia, whom the script describes as “the embodiment of the soul of Russia,” and who has a penchant for drama.
When Yee started writing the play, it was a much more mysterious spy story. She had been aiming for something along the lines of the 2006 film “The Lives of Others,” a thriller she loves, in which an East German secret police officer develops sympathy for the playwright he is spying on. But almost immediately, madcap-caper elements inserted themselves.
“It went from a very serious drama into something that I think felt more like me, where there’s absurdity and comedy and ultimately pathos to it,” she said. Then ensued nine years of “really digging back into it to figure out what happens to these people.” That extended into the first two weeks of rehearsal at Signature, during which, Yee said, she was “writing like crazy” and “flipping the script constantly.”
Her intuition told her all along that the characters were headed somewhere “not good,” despite the play being a comedy.
“I knew, out of this chaos and tumult, something dark happened,” she said. “It took me a while to get all the pieces there.”
Teddy Bergman, who directed “Mother Russia” at Signature, began working with Yee a year ago, when their mutual agent matched them, and they started planning the production. Part of what has wowed him, he said, is Yee’s “anarchic mind.”
“Her ability to blend light and dark, to take potentially very dark subject matter and figure out a way to treat it through a kind of uproarious humor, but never at the expense of the sharpness of what she’s trying to say, I think, is really singular,” he said in an interview.
Naomi Iizuka, who heads the graduate playwriting program at the University of California San Diego, where Yee earned her M.F.A. in 2012, noted that Yee is also unusually “able to express and frame things that we don’t always have the words for, or we experience, but we don’t fully comprehend.”
Those qualities are evident in plays Yee worked on in graduate school: “The Hatmaker’s Wife,” in which an unhappy woman goes missing and a golem arrives to keep her husband company, and “Hookman,” a teen slasher comedy that is also about rape and grief.
Likewise “The Great Leap” (2018), a basketball play about the Tiananmen Square massacre, and “Cambodian Rock Band” (2018), about musicians and the Khmer Rouge genocide. With “Mother Russia,” those two works form a cycle of plays, colliding 20th-century Asian communism with Western pop culture. (The new play makes it in on the technicality that Russia straddles both Europe and Asia.)
“Mother Russia” has fun with the novelty of brands like McDonald’s and Folgers in Yee’s imagined 1990s version of the country. More seriously, the play is about the origins of the contemporary oligarchy, and how the powerful keep hold of their advantage even amid seismic change.
“There are these periods of time where everything shifts in society,” Yee said. “And when these shifts come, there are these brief windows of opportunity that happen, where society can possibly be changed for the better. The play looks at how quickly those windows open and how quickly they shut.”
Yee, who lives in Manhattan with her husband and their two daughters, was born and raised in San Francisco, and scribbled stories as soon as she could grip a pencil. She sees the seeds of her play cycle in her early years: the late ’80s and early ’90s, when she was too young to be aware of geopolitics, yet the contours of her environment were shaped by immigration in her classmates’ families.
“I was starting elementary school at a time when you were beginning to see the effects of the dissolution of communism as we knew it,” she said. “So I went to school with the children of refugees from the Vietnam War. I went to school with kids from Hong Kong, whose parents moved right before the handover back to China. I went to school with kids who were coming over as the Soviet Union was breaking apart.”
She added: “I was kind of witnessing this whole migration brought upon by all these different events in world history that today I’m fascinated with, because I love an origin story. I love knowing how things came to be and why people are where they are, how societies have formed.”
How Yee the playwright came to be owes something to an email she found in the family inbox when she was in high school. Growing up, she said, theater had scarcely figured in her life. She learned dramatic storytelling from cable TV: “I Love Lucy,” a favorite of her mother; the Basil Rathbone “Sherlock Holmes” films, which her father liked; the AMC dramedy “Remember WENN,” a favorite of her own.
Then she read that email, which had been forwarded to her father — she doesn’t know why — about a 10-minute play contest with a Lunar New Year theme. Entries were due the next day. The play she wrote wasn’t good, Yee said, yet it was a family story, both comic and serious, and set in multiple time periods.
“I do think it has, within its DNA, shared DNA with all the other plays that I’ve written,” she said.
At the script-in-hand reading her 10-minute play was given, the adolescent Yee felt for the first time the thrill of her words coming out of actors’ mouths, and the pleasure of making art with other people. She wanted more of that.
So she gathered her friends — “who were also not theater kids,” she said — and formed a company, Youth for Asian Theater. They wrote, directed, acted, put on shows for the community and taught themselves how to do it all.
But there were things about being a playwright that would take years for Yee to learn. As an undergraduate at Yale, where she majored in theater, she remembers feeling “the growing pain of trying to figure out not just how to write, but how to be a theater person.”
Being a theater person, she explained, has to do with knowing how to collaborate. It requires a degree of extroversion. One aspect is being able to get into deep conversations quickly with new acquaintances. Another is recognizing useful feedback from colleagues and audiences, and revising accordingly.
That last bit, uncomfortable as it can be, is what she’s been doing at Signature.
“I sometimes describe playwriting as an exercise in public shame,” she said, wryly. “Not that anyone’s trying to make you feel bad, but I think there is something deeply vulnerable in sharing stories that way, where you are confronted with the people who are receiving your work on a nightly basis, so it’s immediately apparent what is working or not working. If you can get over those feelings of alarm and danger, you can find a way to figure out the story that you want to tell.”
After nine years of “Mother Russia,” it seems she’s found it.
That play may be done, but the cycle could keep expanding. Its next installment might take place on this continent, at the intersection of the midcentury Hollywood blacklist and Chinese American life.
The era has piqued Yee’s interest. Stay tuned.
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