FringeNYC 2013: The ABC's Guide To Getting Famous

Review by Di Jayawickrema · August 10, 2013

When I first read the grim “quick facts” about race in casting listed in the program for Spookfish Theatre Company’s The ABC’s Guide to Getting Famous, I thought I’d open my review with one. By the end of the show, I changed my mind.

This show is indeed a revealing look at the particular challenges of being Asian American in the entertainment industry, but that’s not the main reason why you should see it. You should see this show because it’s fresh and razor-sharp, because it unpacks knotty questions of identity and art with supreme verve. In other words, it’s what the FringeNYC Festival is all about, at its best. By intercutting a satirical solo performance with earnest documentary-style interviews, co-creators, writer Ming Peiffer and director Kat Yen, pack a solid double punch in their first FringeNYC show.

The performer, Sai Somboon, breezes onto the stage, trim and proper in a button-down shirt and glasses, an obliging smile plastered across his face. He’s here to guide us through the “ABCs” of The ABC’s Guide (the title acronym being a sly pun that stands for American Born Chinese as well as a step-by-step guide). Any aspiring Asian-American actors in the audience should pay close attention as Somboon’s four-step process to stardom as it’s a thoughtfully distilled list of actions to avoid, which is what it’s meant to be. “Step one: give a cultural history lesson,” Somboon deadpans. “Since you are an Asian, you should be guilting people into casting you.” An example: draped in Japanese garb and moving serenely, he recites a poem dripping with sarcasm--“Somewhere, my ancestors are meditating.”

While an agile performer in both delivery and physicality, Somboon sometimes oversells the satire, distracting from a script so tightly packed with complexity. It’s perhaps due to this that the insightful video interviews with Asian-American actors is sometimes funnier than the play--well, funnier in that “if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry” way. Each actor has a different approach to the blatant stereotyping they face--which is, of course, the point, since each actor’s experience is as unique as each Asian American’s. One actor mocks a type of theater role offered to Asians; “so your character teaches math during the day, and at night...he fights.” As an Asian actor, you just have to “take the part and eat it,” he says ruefully. Another actor recalls the time he beat out a room full of native Japanese speakers for a commercial bit because his Japanese accent, which was “coming in and out; sometimes it was French,” matched the casting agent’s stereotype of a Japanese person better than the real thing. “That’s the first time I got paid for playing an Asian though,” he concludes with a laugh.

The depressing thread the connects all these anecdotes though is the overwhelming tendency of the entertainment industry to see the Asian-American community as a monolith--when it’s willing to “see” them at all for roles--some of Somboon’s best work here is when he’s satirizing casting’s trailing verbal dance of discrimination; “we have a certain demographic...a target audience...boy next door...” By the end of the show, Somboon drops his bright demeanor and delivers a satisfyingly furious rant that an audience far beyond the Asian-American acting community will relate to. The anger is performance too, and the true message to casting directors is simply delivered at the end: “Just take a chance and see us.” I recommend everybody start with this show.