5 Monologues, Each a Showcase for Asian American Actors Over 60

They might be asked to play a person lying in bed, dying of a stroke, or someone’s horrible mother, or a beloved grandparent struggling with dementia.

“Commercially speaking, ‘old Asian lady’ is a huge amount of my opportunity,” the actor Natsuko Ohama said recently. “I like being ‘old Asian lady.’ But it has its limitations.”

The director Les Waters became even more acutely interested in those kinds of limitations as he was watching a dance performance choreographed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker at the Skirball Center in 2020. The dancers in it, he recalled, were “older than usual.” He was struck by what he saw.

Waters, who most recently directed Lucas Hnath’s “Dana H.” on Broadway, and Mia Katigbak, the co-founder of the National Asian American Theater Company, had met a few years back at a festival and had agreed to work together at some point. Three years later, they were together at dinner, and Waters could not help but share what he called “an insane directorial megalomaniac’s vision.”

What if there was a show that started at night, ran until the morning, and featured a succession of talented older actors telling stories — demonstrating just how much they were capable of?

“Out of Time,” which began performances Feb. 15 at the Public Theater, is not quite as ambitious as that original vision. But it is intended to showcase the talents of older actors all the same. It will feature five performers delivering five new monologues — centered on themes like memory, parenthood, and identity — in a show that will run roughly 150 minutes. All the playwrights and all the actors are Asian American. And all the performers are over 60.

It is a first, officials at the Public maintain, even if the first is a tad specific: The first production in New York theater to be written by five Asian American playwrights for Asian American actors over the age of 60.

“This is to say: ‘Older people in the theater exist,’” Waters, 69, said of the production’s purpose. “We’re here, we’re underused and we have experience.”

“As an old person myself, I find people want to dismiss your stories — I did it to my parents all the time,” he added.

“Hyper-consciousness” in casting these days means you’ll often see one old person featured in an ensemble, making for “its own kind of tokenism,” said Katigbak, who is 67.

“This project addresses that,” she added, “because it centers the old character, the old actor.”

The message will be purposefully reinforced by the fact that the actors will be giving long, demanding monologues, some of which run more than 40 minutes and approach 5,000 words.

In her monologue, Anna Moench, who wrote the 2019 Off Broadway play, “Mothers,” captures a grieving documentary filmmaker dealing with both personal loss and professional rejection.

Naomi Iizuka’s piece features an elderly Japanese man who loves Scotch and hates jazz, while Sam Chanseintroduces audiences to a novelist who is giving a speech at her alma mater despite (or in spite of) having apparently been canceled by the students she is addressing.

The playwrights also include Jaclyn Backhaus, whose breakout work “Men on Boats” was a 2015 Off Broadway hit; and Mia Chung, whose “Catch as Catch Can” will return next season, after a 2018 New York premiere.

Waters and Katigbak said the playwrights were not given specific prompts, except that their monologues should be “of the moment.” Given that they were created during the pandemic, isolation — and an examination of how loneliness metastasizes and manifests when family and friends all but abandon you — pervades almost all of the works.

In a round-table discussion earlier this month, the actors said that living through the last few years has made them intimately familiar with the feeling.

“My mother, who turned 97 in August, sits at home and watches TV all day because all her friends are gone,” said Glenn Kubota, who will appear in Iizuka’s monologue. “To see what she has to do on a daily basis just to amuse herself is really eye opening. I’m getting a glimpse of what maybe I will be facing 10, 20, years from now.”

Many of the works are also at least somewhat autobiographical. And a few of the playwrights, who are all younger than 60, have created characters that resemble one of their parents. In some cases, in the process of acting, editing and rehearsing, the characters have evolved as their creators have reflected more deeply on themselves and those close to them.

The monologue by Iizuka, whose well-regarded “36 Views” opened at the Public almost two decades ago, features a Japanese man who, in peeling back the layers of his life, recounts the time a bomb fell on his house leading him to wander around Tokyo and end up inside a candy shop.

Iizuka said the character is strongly influenced by her father, who died in December 2020. “It’s about trying to find joy and pleasure, but also running up against your own mortality,” she said.

She shared photos of him with the show’s creative team, who in turn provided them to Kubota. Iizuka said the actor has an “uncanny ability” to capture her father’s “feisty, tart-tongued humor.”

“I’ve found this process incredibly nourishing,” she said.

Kubota noted that the script had changed considerably — from a first draft he felt was filled with anger to the one he is now performing that mostly expresses love.

“Hopefully I can do her work justice,” Kubota said, “because I’m going to be talking about her father in front of all of these people.”

Since the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic roughly two years ago, the number of documented episodes of race-based hate toward people of Asian descent have soared, leaving Asian Americans in New York and beyond to endure what has at times been daily dread about their own safety and also the well-being of their older parents.

The monologues mostly avoid racial animus and lean toward more universal themes. Even still, Katigbak emphasized that in “Out of Time,” audiences will hear the universal stories through Asian American voices — a rarity in the theater, even in 2022.

“We’ve always had limitations — at every age — just being Asian American,” Page Leong, who last performed at the Public in “Too Noble Brothers” in 1997, said of the roles that come to members of her community. “It’s also connected to being relegated to being the surgeon or the lawyer.”

Rita Wolf, who has had roles in Richard Nelson’s recent plays, including “The Michaels,”said, “So much of it is about opportunity.” She added: “Every time I work on something new, I do think about generations of minority performers who, for whatever reason, were marginalized. And I think about how they did not have opportunities to do something like this.”

Ohama is performing Chanse’s work, “Disturbance Specialist,” which recently clocked in at 40 minutes and 21 seconds and 4,998 words. She joked about doing such a piece at her “advanced age,” since it takes hours and hours of memorization.

“When you are our ages, life is there inside of you, so we don’t have to worry about the acting so much,” Ohama said. “But what is concerning to the older actor generally is: Do I know my lines?”

“We have dedicated ourselves to this art form,” she added, “and the thing about us older people is we don’t get a chance to show that very often.”