Fresh ideas, bold stories and a few pesky pigeons
L–R: Matt Loveranes and Nadia Freeman
We loved having the opportunity to chat with two of the playwrights connected to Proudly Asian Theatre’s Fresh Off the Page: Nadia Freeman and Matt Loveranes.
Nadia is an Indo-Fijian and Pākehā poet, playwright and multidisciplinary artist who has recently ventured into dialogue-driven comedy for the first time.
Matt is a Filipino-New Zealand playwright, pop culture enthusiast and self-described aspiring “cartographer of human relationships”, drawn to stories that are off-kilter, murky and sometimes taboo.
Both are part of the wider story of Proudly Asian Theatre – a company creating space for Asian artists in Aotearoa to make ambitious, contemporary work on their own terms.
Recently this mahi made its way to our neck of the woods, when Proudly Asian Theatre’s Fresh Off the Page initiative returned to Pōneke with a reading of Nadia’s new play, Clay Pigeons.
From Pretty to Proudly
Proudly Asian Theatre (PAT) was formed by actors Chye-Ling Huang and James Roque in 2013 in response to the lack of Asian representation on Aotearoa’s stages, as well as what they describe as “a need to survive as performers”.
It began life as Pretty Asian Theatre, a name that reflected its founders’ then-shaky relationship with their own diaspora Asian identities. But as the company staged work by Asian diaspora writers, connected with its community and saw what these stories could do, something shifted and in 2016, ‘Pretty’ became ‘Proudly’.
Now led by Executive Director Marianne Infante and co-founder and Artistic Director Chye-Ling Huang, PAT creates contemporary performance driven by Asian artists. Its work is not about defining what an “Asian story” should be. Quite the opposite: the company wants to explode the idea altogether, making room for work that challenges, reinvents, entertains and reveals just how varied those stories can be.
One way it does this is through Fresh Off the Page, a series of playreadings in which brand new scripts by Asian playwrights are developed, directed and performed. Writers get to hear their words out loud, test their ideas with collaborators and audiences, and work out what their plays might become.
And happily for us, this Tāmaki Makaurau-based company brought its most recent reading to The Hannah.
Enter the pigeons
Clay Pigeons is an interactive satirical comedy about a local community facing a sinister new threat: pigeons.
Naturally, an anti-pigeon task force is formed to deal with these “rats with wings”. But how should the committee combat the avian scourge… and who should be trusted to lead the charge?
That part is up to the audience.
Behind the gloriously silly premise is political polarisation, media bias and misinformation. Nadia wanted to write about these things, but she needed a subject that audiences were unlikely to have strong feelings about before they entered the theatre.
Pigeons, welcome to the stage.
“I always come up with these ideas and then I try to figure out how I’m going to do them afterwards,” she says.
The concept was inspired by a real anti-seagull committee in Edinburgh, whose newsletters Nadia and a friend used to read for entertainment. She filed the idea away for later, and some of the committee’s real-life proposals eventually made their way into the play.
A first for everything
Nadia has spent the better part of the last decade as a performance poet and still describes poetry as her “home and my heart”. Her previous works include Eat These Words, Another Universe and The Girmit, combining poetry with storytelling, music and experimental performance.
Clay Pigeons marks a new creative direction. It is her first dialogue-driven play, her first time writing multiple characters and her first sustained attempt at comedy.
With support from comedy consultant Jerome Chandrahasen, Nadia began building the play’s characters, jokes and story arcs. Through Fresh Off the Page, she also worked with dramaturg Lynda Chanwai-Earle, director Sameena Zehra and a cast of performers who could help her test how the whole thing worked in the room.
Turns out writing a joke on a page is one thing. Hearing an actor deliver it, and discovering whether an audience actually laughs, is something else entirely.
“I don’t really want to write any other way now I’ve experienced collaborative writing,” Nadia says. “This is how you make good writing… with other people, not just on your own.”
Choose your pigeon president
At the centre of Clay Pigeons are two characters competing to become president of the Pigeon Action Committee. The audience gets to vote for the winner, but not everyone is working with the same information.
Throughout the reading, different sections of the audience received different details about the candidates, including rumours, scandals and suspicions. Nobody initially knew that the other half of the room had been given a different version of events.
It turned the reading into part theatre, part social experiment.
Some audience members were influenced by what they had received. Others sensed they were being manipulated and deliberately voted against it. Either way, the experiment held up a playful mirror to the way information reaches us in real life.
“The information they receive might be different to someone else,” Nadia says. “When we’re having conversations with each other, it can be complicated by this.”
How do two people find common ground when their understanding of the facts is completely different? And how often do we assume someone else has seen the same headlines, stories and scandals we have?
Pigeons, it turns out, can carry quite a lot of political baggage.
Letting a play leave the page
For Matt, this kind of development process is incredibly valuable.
According to Nathan Joe’s A Short History of Asian New Zealand Theatre, Matt wrote and staged Aotearoa’s first Filipino-New Zealand play; a title he is, quite rightly, happy to claim. His earlier work was heavily influenced by film and genre, ranging from disco noirs to queer westerns. After discovering the writing of Annie Baker, his focus shifted towards the strange, surprising and often messy territory of human relationships.
Like many writers, Matt knows how easy it is to protect a script until it feels finished.
“Writing can be so solitary,” he says. Artists may hold their work close partly out of preciousness and partly out of self-protection, only sharing it once the final production reaches the stage.
But a workshop or playreading gives the writer a chance to see what is actually there, not just what they imagine is there.
Hearing a script performed can “add texture to it, take it in new, exciting directions and even, on some occasions, reveal what the play is actually about,” Matt says. “They help the piece find its truest, most honest form.”
For Nadia, that meant discovering what landed, what made people laugh and where the interactive elements still felt a little clunky. The audience’s response gave her something concrete to take back to the next draft.
That is the beauty of Fresh Off the Page: the play does not have to arrive polished and complete. The reading is part of the making process.
There is no single Asian story
The practical support matters, but PAT also gives Asian artists a space to make the work they genuinely want to make.
“As Asian artists, we get to just make art that doesn’t have to be about our ethnicity,” Nadia says. “We can be artists who happen to be Asian, and we have as much right to be in the space even if we’re not talking about being Asian.”
Matt agrees. Minority artists can find themselves pushing against expectations about what their work should look like, or what subjects audiences, venues and funders expect them to explore.
“Every artist should have their own point of view when they express something true about the world around them,” he says. “That’s going to look different from person to person.”
If artists feel responsible for presenting a safe, polished or easily understood version of their communities, there is a risk they will pull their punches. Supporting Asian artists properly means making room for the full spectrum: work that is joyful, ugly, radical, funny, confronting, culturally specific, or not about identity at all.
More of this in Pōneke, please
It is especially good to see Fresh Off the Page return to Pōneke. Matt points to the challenges facing artists across Aotearoa right now: less funding, wavering attendance and venues that do not always have the vision or vibrancy they once did.
For Asian artists in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, it can also be hard to work out what systems exist to support them, connect them with one another and help their work reach both diaspora communities and wider audiences.
“There needs to be a vision,” he says. “A vested interest from the theatres and the wider community in growing these voices and getting them to the next level.”
That could mean stronger connections between Asian artists across the motu, partnerships that allow work to tour, and more chances for writers, performers and theatre-makers to meet, experiment and swap ideas.
Fresh Off the Page shows what can happen when those opportunities exist. A writer brings in a script. Actors, directors and dramaturgs gather around it. An audience joins the experiment. The work gets to stretch, wobble, surprise people and grow.
And Matt’s advice for the Asian playwrights thinking about what they might put on the page next?
“Be unafraid to tell your stories. Even the ugly bits. It doesn’t have to be real; it just has to be true. Aspire to greatness.”