ABSTRACT
The year 1965 was a pivotal year both for U.S. immigration history and Asian American theatre, with dramatic changes in the legal and cultural status of Asian Americans during the Cold War period and the era of social activism in the 1960s and 1970s. This chapter explores the development of a “model minority” myth and its lasting impacts through such examples as a Rogers and Hammerstein musical Flower Drum Song, David Henry Hwang’s 2002 revision of the musical, and recent plays by Asian American playwrights. Asian American activism conceptualized Asian America as a politically mobilized, self-defined identity based on interethnic solidarity that we can see as informing the early history of the East West Players (the first Asian American theatre founded in 1965). This chapter also offers a reading of the first play by an Asian American to be produced off-Broadway. Frank Chin’s The Chickencoop Chinaman was both a break-through production and an exemplary theatrical expression of the search for a new cultural identity.
