Anchuli Felicia King
A 25-year-old Australian playwright is taking theatres by storm in Sydney, London and the USA.
IT’S SAFE TO say Thai-Australian playwright Anchuli Felicia King is pretty busy right now. After premiering her first (yes, first) play,
White Pearl, at London’s Royal Court Theatre in June, she’s about to take it to Sydney Theatre Company and then Washington DC. Then there’s Golden Shield, which has just played Melbourne Theatre Company. Meanwhile, Slaughterhouse will premiere at Belvoir’s independent space, 25A, in October. “It’s definitely been a crazy year,” she says, with remarkable understatement.
King worked as a dramaturg, sound designer and projection designer in Australia and New York before picking up the pen in 2016 during her dramaturgy studies at Columbia University. Written on her summer break from Columbia, White Pearl follows six Asian women after a racist ad from their company’s signature skin whitening product has gone viral, causing global outrage. Almost from the outset, King knew she had hit on something special. “With the response that the Asian community was having to it, and the Asian actors who got to work on the play who felt really strongly about it, it felt really rewarding,” she says. The play went on to win a prestigious playwriting award at Columbia and was given a reading at Roundabout Theatre Company, before being picked up by the Royal Court, Sydney Theatre Company and Studio Theatre in Washington DC. “It got programmed really quickly, which is not the normal trajectory, particularly for one’s first play,” she says. “So yeah, it has felt pretty astronomic.”
When King was a child, her father’s job as an environmental scientist kept the family on the move, and her teenage years were split between international schools in Manila and Melbourne and summers in Thailand. Not surprisingly, global community is something she tries to model in her rehearsal rooms. In the author’s notes for White Pearl, she urges future directors to “not be a dick” and choose actors from the same cultural background as their characters, while Golden Shield is written in English and Mandarin and includes both native and non-native English speakers. “I want to create certain types of rehearsal rooms where we have lots of immigrant artists from all over the world; there are multilingual rehearsal rooms that are places of solidarity but also of learning and accepting.”
Asian women in particular, she says, suffer not only from a lack of roles but a lack of complexity in the characters they play. “I have a lot of female Asian friends who are wonderful, complex human beings and I didn’t see us getting represented anywhere near to the level of complexity I would like. I didn’t want sugar-coated utopian depictions of Asianness all the time. At Columbia, I saw all these phenomenal Asian actors that were getting boxed out of roles because they were non-native English speakers or people thought they didn’t conform to a certain type and I was like, ‘This is bullshit.’”
Next up for King is a return to the United States, where’s she’ll oversee the Washington DC production of White Pearl and work on her next project, a response play to
Othello set in the world of Shakespearean academia, commissioned by the American Shakespeare Centre. “You know I have the luxury of being a global playwright right now and I’m pretty happy doing that,” she says. “I’ve only functionally been a playwright for two years, so who knows? In a year, I might be working in a Starbucks.”
Pearl, Riverside Theatres, Riverside Theatres, Cnr Church & Market Sts, Parramatta 2150. 02 8839 3398. sydneytheatre.com.au. $39-$49. Oct 24-Nov 9. Belvoir St Theatre, 25 Belvoir St, Surry Hills 2010. 02 9699 3444. belvoir.com.au. $25. Oct 16-Nov 2.
“I saw that Asian actors were getting boxed out of roles”