By APA Staff
Judy Soo Hoo is an award-winning playwright who regularly works with Lodestone Theatre, and acts as the literary manager at East West Players. Her talent speaks volumes onstage, but for those who are not ready to trust that sneaky, indeterminable factor X, here's some tangible evidence: the aforementioned awards won include the EWP/AT&T New Voices Play Award, the Yukon Pacific New Play Award, and the PEN/WEST Emerging Voices Fellowship. Her work was chosen for Best Male Stage Monologues, Best Stage Scenes by Smith and Kraus Publishers, as well as Bold Words: A Century of Asian American Writing. Highly impessive. The Solve for X crew are onto something... -- Ada Tseng
Interview with Kipp Shiotani
April 3, 2005
Interviewed by Ada Tseng and Chi Tung
Transcribed by Ada Tseng
APA: Can you introduce yourself?
Judy Soo Hoo: My name is Judy Soo Hoo, I'm the playwright for Solve for X.
APA: When did you start writing this?
JSH: This play took about two years; it went though several drafts. I originally wrote the first draft through the Mark Taper forum; they commissioned it as a play and I wrote a couple of drafts through them. It went through the Asian Theater Workshop, and I did some other rewriting in Cleveland, so it went through several drafts.
APA: Where did you get the inspiration for the play?
JSH: I've always been interested in Phadrea, which is the Greek myth about a stepmother in love with her stepson, and I've always been a fan of Racine's version of it. But I also wanted to riff on it too and bring in a contemporary, hip element. Then I wanted to bring in chick literature and the idea of relationships into it. And I also wanted to do something different with poetry because I have a background in poetry, and I wanted to bring in the Sufi poets. It was about the very mystical experience of love, how the mystical experiences with words can elevate you to new ecstasies. So I wanted to bring all of these elements into this play.
APA: How did you come up with the concept of Solve for X? Did you start out with that idea or did it happen to fit with the story?
JSH: I think it kind of evolved. I was thinking about, "what is passion?" Sometimes you can't explain it, sometimes you can. Sometimes something more logical like math can explain things more rationally. And I always liked the term "solve for x." How do you solve for x? How to do you solve for something that's more emotional than logical? So, that was the X factor.
APA: What about the whole idea of tea?
JSH: Tea is the new coffee. It's like the new black. Grey was the new black. I think tea is the new coffee. It's probably the next industry that's going to overtake America, kind of like how Starbucks is taking over the Pacific Rim. I think it'll be the next new drink. It's very Asian-specific. Because in any Asian market, there are 20 brands of tea to choose from. And, of course, Boba rocks.
APA: What do you think it is about Greek mythology, or Greek tragedy, that transfers so well into theater, or is used for source material so often?
JSH: I think the Greeks were probably the first practitioners of drama, and they knew how to mime human emotion. They knew how to work with tragedy, and also what makes something so noble, and something so fair, and something so tragic. I think they instinctively knew about human nature and its shortcomings and used it to their advantage. So that's why I think everyone, in some way, goes back to the Greek mythology because it's so universal. They just knew how to mine it for its dramatic elements.
APA: I read something in the program bout how the play was influenced by a book...
JSH: Yea, it's called Animal Husbandry. [by Laura Zigman] It became the Ashley Judd movie, but they called it something else: Someone Like You. The idea of new cow, old cow, came from the "New Cow Theory" in Animal Husbandry. That was a chick-lit novel.
APA: So this play, it's an all-Asian cast, but there's no mention of being Asian -- they're just human characters. Is that something you take into consideration when you're writing your plays?
JSH: I love three-dimensional characters. I think each character is rich, and I wanted each character to be as rich as possible. I really think that there's not a lot of opportunies for Asian American actors and characters to be onstage, so I really wanted to mine that facet. I don't like being normative. So I thought, let's try something different with these characters. They may be Asian, but let's try something different, something more universal with their emotions and their characters.
APA: A huge reason the play succeeds is because you have a very keen sense, a good ear, for dialogue. How did you learn to be well-versed in writing dialogue?
JSH: I think the poetry background really is helpful, because they teach you how to stress and unstress syllables and sounds. There's very much a melody and music, rather than just a clunking sort of rhythm. So, poetry and how they use meter and how they use sounds. It's true, sometimes the way it sounds is most imporant. But I do try to have a spine of narrative in it. But it's also about working with music. I also write with music a lot, so whatever is on I'll listen to it and maybe the scene will be reflective of the music I'm listening to.
APA: Were you involved in the casting process?
JSH: Yes, I sat through all of the auditions. Every single one.
APA: What was it like seeing it come together, from the page to the theater?
JSH: The process was like six weeks, so in the beginning, it was very raw and they were trying to find everything. And it was great for them to experiment with the language and the staging and the characters. We did a lot of experiments. We did an exercise with the male members of the cast doing lewd gestures, to see which lewd gesture was the most effective, and even our stage manager was involved in that. [laughs] Most productions only give us four weeks. So I'm just really glad we had the experience of playing around for a while.
APA: What's on the horizon for you, what are you working on?
JSH: I think I'm going to write some more plays. There is a play we're doing this fall called American Monsters 2. It's a series of five plays based on the horror genre, just in time for Halloween. It's gonna be an Asian-American cast. It's gonng be bloody and suspenseful and horrific and hopefully you can come seen that.
APA: Thank you so much for your time.