In 2017, Kimber Lee went to see Miss Saigon on Broadway. The actor turned playwright had never seen the musical in its entirety before but had friends who had performed in it and she knew the shape of the story: a doomed romance between a Vietnamese woman and a GI during the Vietnam war, inspired by Puccini’s Madama Butterfly.
But that didn’t prepare her for the dismay she felt. “It was utter shock,” she says, speaking from New York via Zoom. “I remember sinking lower and lower in my seat. Even walking in and seeing the set I was like, ‘OK, I see what’s going on.’”
Aside from racist tropes around the Vietnamese characters and the reductive, she says, sexualised portrayal of Asian women, the misogyny and cultural imperialism were staggering. Lee went home and wrote her response: untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play. Beginning in Japan in 1906 and spanning over 100 years, it is structured around a scene that repeats across the ages and references South Pacific and M*A*S*H as well as Miss Saigon.
The scene speeds through the plot of Miss Saigon in miniature: a GI lands in a village, falls for a local woman, abandons her after the war and then comes back with his American wife to claim his child, leaving her to take her own life. Its characters are glaringly stereotyped and the drama unpicks these tropes with every repeat, until we arrive in present-day Harlem for a reckoning. A close-to-the-bone satire, fuelled by coal black humour and fierce intelligence, the play won the inaugural Bruntwood international prize for playwriting in 2019.
Lee acknowledges it may be too “spicy” for some. “I’ve been telling the cast that we’re juggling with batons on fire. The material is offensive. The stereotypes are offensive. It is not a soft pedal of anything, but it [the play] is a machine that knows itself very deeply. It knows what it is doing. It is interested in dismantling things in culture that we have all consumed because they are in the air. We are interested in putting those things under a bright spotlight.”
A co-production between the Royal Exchange, Manchester international festival, the Young Vic and Headlong, the play’s programming brought an added charge because Miss Saigon itself is to be revived this summer at the Crucible in Sheffield. New Earth Theatre, a touring company of British east and south-east Asian artists, pulled out of staging their play Worth at the Crucible in protest at that decision. Miss Saigon’s creative team, led by Robert Hastie and Anthony Lau, released a statement giving reasons for reviving the musical. When the controversy broke, Lee had no intention of getting involved – until she read what they said.
“It was like ‘we understand some people feel this and some people feel that. We have had conversations and there are some problems.’ But they proceeded without ever naming what those problems were. They did not name the thing and they dismissed it point by point as just how some people feel.”
Lee’s play was picked up before the pandemic but became victim to that long pause. Did the murder of George Floyd and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter affect its development? “No, that had really happened prior to the pandemic with three really intensive development processes … The thing that happened for me [during the pandemic] was very much more about deepening my political education and an idea that has been growing in me for many years, which was this creeping feeling about our collective tendency to focus on individual behaviour rather than systemic structures, which I think causes us to go round in loops. My interest is in exposing that there is a system at play and that it is operating on all of us.”
In 2021, Lee was named as a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn prize and received a special commendation award for her play The Water Palace. Her trajectory appears firmly on the up. But Lee did not set out to be a writer. Born in South Korea, she moved with her family to America when she was a baby and grew up with a passion for drama. She spent 10 years as an actor and only turned to writing due to the lack of roles on offer. “It was very much a situation where, if we were lucky, once a year they would do the Asian-American play. You’d be lucky to get a walk-on role with a few lines and then you would understudy one of the leading actors … I remember once being in a play with a friend who was cast in a leading role, and her talking about keeping process notes [for the part]. I realised I hadn’t done that because what are the notes for Servant Number Two?”
Out of that restlessness came writing, but for herself, in private, at first. “I was just scribbling things that I didn’t really think of as writing because I was still very committed to acting. Then a friend said, ‘Well, you can invite some actors to your living room and have them read it aloud for you.’ I did that and it was the most alive I had felt in a very long time.”
She got into grad school at the University of Texas in Austin and moved to New York over a decade ago. There she found the Lark Play Development Center, whose alumni includes Katori Hall, Jackie Sibblies Drury and Rajiv Joseph, and which she says was vital to her development.
Although Lee’s verdict on Miss Saigon and Madama Butterfly is categorical in her play, it does not follow that these works should be consigned to the dustbin, she says. “I do not think of my play as an order that they may never be performed … If we photoshop out all racist aspects of our cultural artefacts, suddenly society loses its memory about what it has done. I don’t know that I’m interested in helping people do that. I think the discomfort should be wrestled with but I do think that there’s a way to do it, where we can all notice it and see it for what it is. The discomfort will not kill us. It may, in fact, allow us to deepen an understanding about something that for people who don’t look like us is a long, deep, painful struggle.”
untitled f*ck m*ss s**gon play is at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, as part of Manchester international festival, 24 June-22 July. Then at the Young Vic, London, 18 September-4 November
