Katie Ka Vang, May Lee-Yang, and Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay are performers, writers, and activists in the Twin Cities Asian American community. I first became aware of Katie through her work with Pangea World Theater and Theater Mu, and Saymoukda and May are my former students at the University of Minnesota. I have followed their careers as artists and arts leaders with great interest and admiration. Each of them is committed to theatre work that speaks directly to local communities, especially communities that formed as large numbers of Southeast Asians relocated to the upper Midwest following the late twentieth-century U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The traumatic effects of the wars in Southeast Asia did not end with the Paris Peace Agreement of 1991. Rather, the migration and resettlement of refugees radically changed areas of the U.S. that had previously been predominately white. Not only has Minnesota’s Asian American population grown dramatically as a result, but it is also distinctive in terms of its ethnic and national identities, with well over half of Asian Minnesotans identifying as Southeast Asian, and Hmong as the largest group. Importantly, these three distinctive and powerful writers have found the Twin Cities to be not only a supportive artistic space but also a place of possibility that encourages innovative modes of story-telling and new audience members.
This interview was conducted on February 23, 2023. It has been edited for clarity and length.
Josephine Lee (JL):
So what got you involved in theatre?
May Lee-Yang (MLY):
I got involved in theatre in a very funny way when I was a senior in high school. I was working at Taco Bell on the weekends and needed to earn money. One day I opened up the local Hmong newspaper and they had an ad that said they were looking for actors to be in a Hmong play. They were paying $200 a week, which was more than what I was making at Taco Bell. So I was like, I have no acting experience, but why not? I went to audition and—I didn’t know it at the time—but it was Pom Siab Hmoob Theatre, which is the first Hmong American theatre ever, which transitioned into the Center for Hmong Arts and Talent a couple of years later. I went to the Playwrights Center to audition. My mom dropped me off and I was 18. I was terrible. But Nkauj’lis Lyfoung1 was there and she hired me, I think, because they wanted to nurture young artists.
So that was my first foray into theatre. In terms of writing, one day I was at the library and I kept seeing these ads for a fellowship at the Playwrights Center, the Many Voices Fellowship. I remember reading about how theatre was very white and so this was an opportunity to bring more writers of color into the fold. They knew that there were so few writers of color working in theatre that they accepted anything: stories, poems. At that time, I didn’t have any plays. So I submitted poetry and some stories and I got in. It was sort of accidental. It was more curiosity. And I kind of just stayed in.
Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay (SDV):
My first leap into theatre happened in the fourth grade. Our teacher cast me as Casper the Friendly Ghost. It was great. Nobody was there to mentor us. It was just her just trying to get us to memorize lines. Much later on, Theater Mu’s Rick [Shiomi] wrote a piece that was based on my late aunt’s life.2 She was a royal dancer in the courts. A traditional dancer. I saw that and I thought it was amazing that this theatre company existed and that they wanted to tell her story. Our family was just so proud of her.
Then in 2009 or 2010, I got really tired of struggling as a poet, and May [Lee-Yang] asked me if I wanted to try playwriting, And so I’m like, okay, goodbye poetry world. She had co-founded this group called The Unit [Collective] Playwrights of Color. They were all fellows at the Playwrights Center at the time. I learned so much from that group. I learned how to write dialogue. I learned about scene, conflict, character, arc—all the fun things. Rick offered me a fellowship to work on Kung Fu Zombies.3That’s when I decided to take it more seriously. And then the rest is history.
Katie Ka Vang (KKV):
I have always been around performance because I went to a Hmong church. I was in a play at church, and then I started to sing in choir, [and] became part of a contemporary Christian rock band at the age of 15 or so. When I came into theatre, I was working for the Advocates for Human Rights, a non-profit. I was the front office receptionist and admin and Dipankar Mukherjee4 from Pangea World Theater was on the board. He came in for a board meeting and I was in the front and he asked me if I was interested in performing. He told me that I didn’t need to have acting experience. I just needed to have the willingness to learn and curiosity. So I was like, okay, sure. They were an ensemble-based theatre group at the time, and they do devised work. I participated in one of their processes and created a show called Journey to Safety around immigrant women and domestic violence—you know, light stuff. We created this ritualistic piece around violence and what immigrant women go through. Then it was performed at International Women’s Day. That sort of unlocked something that I didn’t know that I needed: the performance aspect and the creating process.
I became a part of Pangea’s ensemble for about four or five years, in the devised and physical theatre world. After that very first performance with Pangea, I was like, I really like this, but I don’t know what else to do. I went to a couple of auditions and I suck, so I don’t think I’m an actor, but I’m not sure. Then Meena [Natarajan]5 was like, Well, you know, that story you told us yesterday about your mom—why don’t you just write that down? And I was like, Okay. And then, That thing you told us about your dad, would you write that down? I’m like, Okay. Through like a series of small conversations with them, I pieced together my first solo show.
JL:
Each of you started with a way of getting into performance that wasn’t about auditioning for a professional show. It was either through performance skills you already used for church or in a community-based performance. Do you think you’ve changed your attitude towards theatre, especially now that you’ve had full blown productions?
KKV:
I definitely have a bigger perspective. I think when you’re a young artist and you’re up and coming, everything is about “my voice.” And that is still important. But as I’m getting older, I think that is really just one part of the creative process. The beautiful thing about theatre is that you’re able to get a group of people into a room in what (in my opinion) should be a safe space for folks to really dive deep, be vulnerable, mess up and learn together. So it’s really widened my lens [on] the possibilities of how theatre can be used.
SDV:
Theatre makers have said to me that they feel I have an unsophisticated way of telling stories, and I think I’m okay with that. They’re not my target audience. My target audience is my community. That’s who I center in my work. I center their stories. I center their participation at different levels of development of the work. It’s really important for me to bring them in early on and get their feedback to make sure that multiple experiences and viewpoints are included at the very beginning, so that it doesn’t feel sensationalized when the story does happen. It’s not written for the white gaze.
Something that I try to do for people when they do come in and share themselves and their stories with me is [to think about] how do I create safer spaces for them? I don’t think it’s possible to have an ultimate safe space, but to create safer spaces, that’s possible because the stories that they tell are about survival, about loss, trauma. A lot of them are survivors of the war.6 In the work that I do as a theatre maker, I’m always going to center my community first.
JL:
May, you’ve gone through the MFA track. Could you speak to how your approach to theatre has changed over the years?
MLY:
Well, I went to get an MFA in creative nonfiction. I was like, forget theatre—I’m going to take a break and go do something else. That’s probably some good context about my relationship to writing. I’ve always talked about how I think literature is like my first love and theatre was the hot rich guy that took me out. And then I had a chance to go back to my first love. I think my relationship to theatre has evolved because I live in this world as a writer, performer, educator, and producer. That allows me to have a really interesting perspective as a creator, because I definitely see theatre as a tool for community building or for change. [It’s] an opportunity to show more of my own humanity as well as the humanity of the communities I care about, and also an opportunity to change the types of audiences that go to see theatre. I definitely started writing to tell my own story. But as an educator, I’ve had the privilege to work with Hmong elders or youth of color who are in leadership programs to develop original work about the things that they care about. And in those kinds of spaces, it’s not about me. I’m there really just as a facilitator using all the knowledge I’ve accumulated to try to help make the process easier for them.
I didn’t want to be a producer, but had to, because people didn’t know how to produce my work. People just weren’t interested or didn’t know if there was an audience. So I think that producing has made me really think about arts access. One of my favorite projects that I ever did was in 2012. I found money and produced the Hmong language version of my play Confessions of a Lazy Hmong Woman. And I knew that my priorities were to get people who were new to theatre in the seats. People who are low income, like elders, [and] people who didn’t speak English because it was all in Hmong. And so that framed how the story was reworked, how it got translated, how we did outreach and where we did it, and even the kinds of amenities that we offered, like free childcare, [and that] you [didn’t] need to make a reservation to show up. That’s the only show I’ve ever done where I saw three generations of one family show up to see a show.
It was in St. Paul at the Wellstone Center, a nonprofit that has a 260-seat theatre. That was really intentional because I wanted it to be in a community space that had free parking. The number of seats was great for me because it meant that we could sell tickets at their full price, but we could also give out tickets to the community and offer reduced tickets and we would still be okay. Childcare was important because I knew that was a barrier. It was going to be too complicated to try to have people make reservations. I reached out to a nonprofit that works with Hmong elders, and they didn’t have time to organize their senior citizens to come to the show. So I just made some tickets off my laptop and printed them out and we distributed them and said, If you bring this in, you can just walk in. And I remember there were senior citizens who lived at the public housing that was just one block over. They just walked in and they’re like, here’s a piece of paper you gave me last week. That was amazing. I think that when people say that people of color and refugees and Hmong people, when folks tell me they don’t come see theatre, I’m like, they do come see theatre. A lot of places just haven’t created a process for them to get in.
JL:
Each of you has written in a range of styles. May, Confessions of a Lazy Hmong Woman was so different from The Korean Drama Addict’s Guide to Losing Your Virginity.7
MLY:
I would say that [Korean Drama Addict’s Guide] was probably the first really full-length piece I had written, because a lot of the things I’d written before would probably be considered performance art or one-act shows. It was the first show I did where I was there completely just as a playwright. And that was a really fun experience.
It was a sold-out run. One day I went to see the show and there was a white couple that came. I was talking to them during intermission, and they said to me that they were subscribers. They had felt exhausted and hesitant about whether they should come that day. Then they were like, Let’s just do this anyway, because they’ve been going to theatre for twenty years. And they told me, We’re so glad we came, it was really fun. If nothing else, I think what was great about the show is that whether you love Korean dramas or not, people had fun. They didn’t stay because they felt obligated. They stayed because they wanted to see what would happen.
It’s a story about a young woman with a Korean drama addiction and a ghost problem and what happens when she meets a Korean guy. Because I’m a Korean drama addict myself, [that] needs to be channeled somewhere.
JL:
Kung Fu Zombies vs. Shaman Warrior will be put on by Theater Mu in summer 2023. You’ve got a children’s story, The Snow Queen,8 and then a musical that you’re also working on. Is it my imagination or is everything just coming at you at once?
SDV:
I love it. This is how I roll. I can’t sit still. I need lots of projects happening. So my friend Tyler [Olsen-Highness] called me one day and said do you want to write this thing with me? It’s an adaptation. Do you know, Hans Christian Andersen? I was like, Yeah. Do you know “The Snow Queen”? I said, No, let me read it. I read it and I was like, Oh, this story’s kind of whack. And so he’s like, How would you change it? And so we had an idea session, and then he told me, Okay, when we write it, we have to make sure that many, many characters are there so that these students can embody these characters. So it’s a vehicle to teach kids how to do theatre. And it’s great. At one point you’ll see like fifty people on stage.
JL:
Probably a different vibe from Kung Fu Zombies at Theater Mu?
SDV:
I’ve been working on the prequel to Kung Fu Zombies vs. Cannibals since 2016, called Kung Fu Zombies vs. Shaman Warrior. When I met up with Lily Tung Crystal9 a couple of years ago and told her about these two plays, she said, Wouldn’t it be great if we could do them in rep in 2023? We decided to mush them together so it becomes this super remix. So now the play is going to be a zombie saga, shaman warrior, and cannibals. The majority of the cast is Southeast Asian, which is very important for me.
L:
You’re following the journey of a young female protagonist from the US to Laos after a devastating pandemic plague. And this was written before COVID, but it feels really resonant now.
SDV:
Yeah, she’s bringing back her parents’ ashes. And learning about the war that disrupted their life and how they got to where they are in the United States. But it’s not explicit. It’s like one of those things where I’m like tricking people to come in using pop culture and sci fi and horror and comedy and hip hop. And then [when] I get them in, I’m like, ha ha! You’re learning history.
JL:
Katie, what made you think about [writing] a musical (Again) as opposed to just a straight play?
KKV:
I started to get really interested in music and theatre because my first foray into arts was really through music and my involvement in church and singing. I always felt like singing, even if I was in a shitty mood. Music would shift the frequency that I was in. I hate to admit it—and I’ve just recently admitted this to myself—but my default is very much a tortured writer. A lot of my friends are like, but when we’re just hanging out, you’re so funny. How come your plays don’t really reflect that? I don’t know. But I think that the musical has really opened me up to more levity and has really been a vehicle for me to draw on that part of me that’s really funny, which I think when I’m acting and performing other people’s work really comes through.
JL:
Can you talk about collaborating with a composer?
KKV:
It really is a deep process, constantly changing and growing. In some ways it makes it easier because you have someone to bounce ideas off of. Melissa [Li] is not a book writer in this piece. She’s able to be very detached. We’ll have pitch corners. I’m like, How about this?
JL:
Will she come back to you with some ideas that might actually change the storyline or the script?
KKV:
Only in songs. If I feel like this is a musical moment, she’ll respond, Okay, what is the storytelling within this? And then we’ll go back and forth. I feel like I’m constantly refining up until the moment and beyond. I think this is really a story about friendship and family relationships but bottled up and contained in a cancer story.
JL:
This Theatre Journal special issue examines the term “refugee.” Can this term serve as an entry point into your work?
SDV:
I was indifferent to the word “refugee” until high school and I had a conversation with my older cousins. Before, we always understood the word “refugee” as connoting dirty people with baggage, or people who have been abandoned, unwanted—all these negative things. But after speaking with them, I understood that it meant resilience and hopefulness and survival and good things. And so I love it. I love identifying as a former refugee. I think it’s important to do that. I also always, always make sure to let people know that I’m ethnic Lao and American, because I think that’s also important because these identities inform my work. It’s all I know and all I want to really talk about. But it’s also a calling card to other people who are in my situation or who identify similarly. There are not a lot of Lao Americans out there who are artists, who are theatre makers. So when I identify as such, I can say, Hey, I exist. You exist. Let’s find each other, let’s make something together. Let’s be a community. You know, I think American theatre has tried so hard to push us out. I don’t think there has ever been a safe space for us as Southeast Asian women, [as] former refugees. Which is why a lot of us find our own path. We self-produce. We do what we have to do.
KKV:
[“Refugee”] does really inform the work that I do. I feel like the more intersectionality and the more identities we have, the better we are as human beings. I think it makes our humanity towards others even wider. I think it’s just really indicative of my lens. And also, if that is a part of my identity and I put it out there, people might understand the work that I do more.
MLY:
I do connect to being a refugee for the very literal reason that I was born in a refugee camp. As Mooks [Vongsay] had mentioned earlier, by identifying yourself as that you’re building connections with other people or helping people see you in a different way. I mean, you’re speaking to all of us at very different stages of our lives and our careers. I can imagine that there might be people of any age who might see us as Asian women who have master’s degrees, who are in the arts, and it would be very easy for them to have assumptions about what kind of a lifestyle we have, what kind of a background we had growing up. And I want to remind folks that I’m a 1.5 generation Hmong American refugee.10 I think this is important for people to know so that young people who want to go in the arts can feel like they can do it.
People might think that we could pass for East Asian or something. We’re not. And as a Hmong person, I think that it has for me layers of meaning as well. We’re stateless folks. Even though we’ve made homes in different countries, the United States included, our world is constantly shifting. I wrote a play about divorce in the Hmong community in 2014 and I think today it might not feel as relevant. But around that time, for the first time in Hmong history, Hmong people were getting divorced right and left. And I thought that was fascinating because it was reflective of a gender and sexual revolution that was happening within our community. So I realize that play is not timeless. It is grounded in that year.
JL:
We sometimes think about plays as only being valuable if they’re played again and again. But in fact, they can be valuable because they capture the moment.
MLY:
Exactly. I think so many of those plays that I wrote that haven’t been produced capture a very specific time in Hmong American history. And I think about how a lot of the people I know these days would never have known that that existed, our world is shifting so much. Because we don’t have a motherland and our written language is kind of tenuous, we don’t have a lot of written history about our culture. The plays or the stories, whatever form you choose, help to hold the memory of these experiences. Experiences that are not going to make it into history books. No one’s going to care that the first Hmong bar, in my memory, opened in 1997. But I find that fascinating because it’s changed the trajectory of so much of Hmong culture.
JL:
How do gender and sexuality enter into your work?
SDV:
I like to feature strong women in my stories I tell because that’s what I saw growing up. I really don’t like fumbling idiots. I hate that.
JL:
So centering a female protagonist with kickass martial arts skills is probably right up your alley.
SDV:
Yeah. She’s not going to fumble a gun, you know? Or a sword, or an insult to somebody, a clap back. I think something that people don’t know about me because I’m not super public about it, is that I am queer, I am bisexual. That shows up in some of my stories, too. It’s important for me to do that and not to do it in a way that’s very sensational. People don’t deserve that. They don’t need to have their relationships or their feelings put on display like that. So I always take care of my characters to make sure to take care of my community, to make sure that they’re not going to be further harmed.
KKV:
Oftentimes my female characters grapple with the sense of being strong, but also [with] the patriarchal system that they grew up in. They operate from that place of navigating this modern reality that they all would dream of, but also while undoing the conditioning that they’ve had, whether the character is aware of it or not.
MLY:
Gender is definitely at the heart of, I would say, 95% of my work. And sexuality is 75% of my work. Identity, for sure, 100%. [Hmong] is a patriarchal culture. I grew up having to just fight for the right to live as myself. For example, when I tell people, Hmong feminists included, about my experiences growing up, people kept saying, That’s weird, you’re different. How is this possible? And so I wrote Confessions of a Lazy Hmong Woman and even then I got pushback. It’s literally my life. It’s not anyone else’s life. But I kept getting pushback about making Hmong women look bad because I didn’t fit certain stereotypes. And so I feel like the patriarchy is always something that is a part of my real life and my character’s real lives—it also affects men. I mean, thinking of my divorce play again, why is divorce important? Because of the patriarchy, women couldn’t get divorces because they would be ostracized. So the idea that we’re having large scale divorce [rates] for the first time here, I think is huge.
Even The Korean Drama Addict’s Guide to Losing Your Virginity: yeah, it’s a romantic comedy. But this is also a woman who has no father and essentially wants to have a child because she knows she’s the last of her line. And then there are all these other conflicts—should she be with Hmong men or not? I feel like patriarchy and its constraints on women are always something that my characters are grappling with.
JL:
What is it like to make theatre in the Twin Cities?
SDV:
I think artists here in Minnesota feel more empowered to be cultural producers, mainly because we have the resources here. Minnesota’s great. We have the Legacy Amendment.11 We can apply for a State Arts Board grant and pay ourselves to work, to write. I wish that all states had that. It’s unfortunate that artists are not given that sort of priority because ultimately we are the creative documentarians of our communities, of society.
MLY:
Yes, I think this funding has also enabled a lot of Minnesota institutions, organizations, individuals to support the careers of emerging artists. None of us went to school initially to go study theatre. So I really appreciate that there are all these programs that have supported my growth as a writer and performer.
KKV:
I feel like I do have deep roots here—I think we all do. When we started coming up, we just naturally became immersed in the theatre community and we started to find different pockets to embed ourselves in.
JL:
Now you get to ask each other a question or give each other a shout out.
MLY:
I’m actually going to shout out Mooks because I feel like you challenged me to dream bigger because your scripts are huge. You do a lot of the things that people tell us not to do. You have too many characters, settings are big, it’s complicated, it’s culturally specific, and I’m always like, oh shit, no one’s going to want to produce this when I start dreaming that way. But you are just like, fuck it, I’m going to create it and somebody’s going to produce it. I don’t need everybody to produce it, but I’m going to make it happen. And so I think that makes me think about how I need to also dream bigger and not compromise.
SDV:
I think each of us makes really revolutionary work, right? We ask the hard questions of our communities. There are taboo topics: you’re not supposed to talk about illness, you’re not supposed to talk about divorce and sexuality and all these other things. But we do it and we make it in a way that’s really accessible to our communities. May and Katie, in the next ten years, what do you see happening or having changed because of your plays having gone up [and] people seeing them?
KKV:
I hope that there are more voices. I hope that the next time there are more than the three of us. We don’t shy away from taboo topics; in some ways we’re really laying really fertile ground for people to talk about real shit. And hopefully they’ll do it better than us because there’ll be so much more support, so much more understanding. There is less explanation that they have to do.
MLY:
What I hope to keep seeing is an evolution in the types of audiences who show up in theatre spaces. Theatre audiences can be diverse. I’ve seen them become diverse. So that’s one thing. But also, I want to see more diverse stories that are in conversation with each other, for good or for bad.
JL:
In closing, let’s think aspirationally. What would your dream project be?
KKV:
I think I’d like to curate a venue that has eighty rooms and contract a bunch of playwrights and theatre artists to design each room and write a story for that and pay everybody all the dollars to do it.
SDV:
I want to see my Kung Fu Zombie saga include Kung Fu Zombies versus Girl Scouts. It needs to be an eight-hour film that’s produced by, I don’t know, HBO, Monkeypaw Productions or something. The entire cast is going to be Southeast Asian. They’re going to speak Lao and Khmer and Hmong, all the Southeast Asian languages. And I’m going to play one of those Girl Scouts. Cast myself opposite Jason Momoa.
MLY:
I would like to write a musical, but one for a cast of thirty people, of Hmong folks being bilingual, dancing, singing, doing the whole thing. I already started writing some possible songs. It’s going to be very offensive as well, but also very educational and fun.
JL:
Such a pleasure to have this conversation. Thank you all so much.
1. Nkauj’lis Lyfoung is the founder (with Jaime Meyer) of Pom Siab Hmoob [Gazing into the Heart of the Hmong] Theatre. Their first production was Hmong Tapestry: Voices from the Cloth (1990).
2. Land of a Million Elephants was produced by Theater Mu in 1994.
3. Kung Fu Zombies vs. Cannibals was commissioned and produced by Theater Mu in 2013.
4. Dipankar Mukherjee is the Co-Artistic Director of Pangea World Theater.
5. Meena Natarajan is the Executive and Co-Artistic Director of Pangea World Theater.
6. The Laotian civil war between the Communist Pathet Lao and the Royal Lao government was fought between 1959–1975.
7. The Korean Drama Addict’s Guide to Losing Your Virginity was produced by Theater Mu in 2018.
8. This production was from Hans Christian Anderson’s short story of the same name for the Rose-town Playhouse in Minnesota; it ran in March 2023.
9. Lily Tung Crystal is the Artistic Director of Theater Mu.
10. The term “1.5 generation” refers to immigrants who migrated during childhood or adolescence.
11. The Minnesota Legacy Amendment increases the state sales tax by three-eighths of one percent beginning on July 1, 2009 and continuing until 2034. The additional sales tax revenue is distributed into four funds as follows: 33 percent to the clean water fund; 33 percent to the outdoor heritage fund; 19.75 percent to the arts and cultural heritage fund; and 14.25 percent to the parks and trails fund