Been hearing great things about this play (written by playwright and former YOMYOMF editor/creative director Phil Chung--and yes Justin Lin did stop by already for one of the nights).
"An idealistic family man and a cynical, aspiring filmmaker are hired as the Chinese American consultants for Broken Blossoms, Hollywood's first onscreen interracial love story... between a white actress and a white actor in yellowface makeup. If the circumstances weren’t already questionable enough, the consultants must contend with the outsized ego of the film's director D.W. Griffith, who is attempting to belie criticisms of racism after the release of his controversial film The Birth of a Nation.
Presented by East West Players, Philip W. Chung's play Unbroken Blossoms is a historical reimagining of the making of a boundary-breaking Hollywood classic that shines a light on the collateral damage in the search for "authentic" representation, and asks what price we pay for our art.
Originally presented in 2015 by Visual Communications in partnership with East West Players."
Here's a snippet of a review from the LA Times:
“Unbroken Blossoms” introduces James B. Leong, who went on to write and direct the movie “Lotus Blossom” and act in more than 80 films, and Moon Kwan, who later directed more than 50 films in China while distributing Chinese titles in America. Philip W. Chung, a playwright and the creative director for director Justin Lin’s company YOMYOMF, began writing the piece a decade ago upon learning of the consultants’ existence from the Chinese American film history documentary “Hollywood Chinese.”
“I love movies, and it was mind-blowing to me that there were these people who looked like me in significant roles in the industry back then, because that’s not something you learn when you’re coming up and studying film,” he explained. “The most fascinating thing to me is they both became filmmakers after this movie. Just the idea that someone at that time did that, when it’s still hard to even do that now, was so inspiring.”
Get tickets: https://www.eastwestplayers.org/unbroken
