Making impact

To tell the history and story vividly, Huynh says dramaturgy is the key to presenting it to the audience, and one of the missions of the play is to combine history and art.

"It is a practice of taking academic research and blending it with storytelling, so that academic history and facts become usable in an artistic sense," he says, explaining how details add depth and emotion to the history presented to the audience.

The Yale Repertory Theatre also staged performances of the play for high school students at New Haven Public Schools between May 14 and 16.

Cast members say that Chinese American history had never been taught to them at school.

"Especially today, I feel like in many communities, there's been a wish to not teach the difficult chapters of our history," Shih says. "If you don't know your history, you're doomed to repeat it."

He says perhaps that is because people are not aware that this has happened before, and when he started off as an actor, there weren't a lot of plays with Asian casts.

"That's changed and continues to change. When you see more Asian faces in shows on TV, in the media, I think that helps to create a sense that we're all here together," he says, adding that greater presence can change the way Asians are perceived onstage and on screen, by audiences, and change how they are perceived in life.

"Empathy, understanding toward something that may be initially perceived as different — but you see these stories, and you start to understand that we have the same struggles, even though it may be under different contexts, that there's much more that we share, than ways in which we differ," Feng says.

Contact the writer at mingmeili@chinadailyusa.com