The role of a curiosity
Playing the first Asian woman in America — on display, but proud
Ask local actor Rinabeth Apostol about meaningful moments in her career, and the first anecdote she might tell you about is no starryeyed one about the power of live theater. It’s practical and cleareyed. It’s about selfrespect. She remembers TheatreWorks’ production of Chay Yew’s “Red,” in 2004, as the show where she “learned how to protect myself as an actor.” It was the first time she was in a rehearsal room where she felt like her safety as a performer was everyone’s first priority.
Rinabeth Apostol at a rehearsal for Lloyd Suh’s “The Chinese Lady,” which runs through Nov. 3 at Magic Theatre. It’s based on the true story of Afong Moy, who came to the U.S. in 1834 and was promoted as an envoy from faraway lands.
As part of her role, “there was a bag over my eyes during rehearsal, a burlap bag, just in your eyes. I’m like, ‘Oh, am I just supposed to deal with this?’ This is my youth, right, my naivete. I just told one of the actors, ‘Yeah, there’s burlap in my eyes. It’s not very comfortable on, and I’m breathing it in.’ They’re like, ‘Uh, we’re getting you another bag.’ ” Here she takes a beat for effect. “‘That’s an option? We have options like this? OK!’ Next thing you know, brand new bag: looks like burlap, nicely lined on the
inside, and I can breathe, and I can see.
“It just showed me professional theater really is something new, and it is a real job,” she continues. “It is a real career that people pursue, and all of the safety precautions, all of the professionalism — this is kind of a cool experience.”
Apostol can wax rhapsodic about theater, too, of course. It’s her medium.
In person, she speaks at a measured pace, frequently breaking into a conspiratorial whisper, as if she’s saying something forbidden. She talks before rehearsal for “The Chinese Lady” at the Magic Theatre. Apostol stars in the show, which runs through Nov. 3, as the first Asian woman to enter the United States.
Onstage, she’s been rambunctiously silly in San Francisco Playhouse’s “King of the Yees,” both wideeyed and flinty in Ferocious Lotus’ “Two Mile Hollow” and conniving to the point of thirst for blood in Marin Theatre Company’s ”Peerless.” She’s done film and TV, but the stops and retakes make those media a little less magical. She misses “the additional character of the audience.”
For Apostol, talking about theater necessarily means talking about being able to see herself in the art form, which wasn’t always a given “as a queer woman of color.”
A San Francisco native who was raised outside of Sacramento, Apostol (emphasis on the last syllable) first came to the arts in a dance class when she was 3½ to correct for pigeon toes. It worked, but she thinks she loved it more than her Filipino parents bargained for. (They are arts lovers, though, and, she says, “For immigrant parents, this is not at all normal.”)
As she’s established herself in the theater scene, her next phase has been being “conscious of the roles that I choose — when I have choice . ... It’s a rarity, and when I do have the luxury to pick and choose, it has the added bonus of trying to accept what kind of responsibilities fall within that.”
As recently as a few years ago, when she’d weigh offers of roles, pay was her sole consideration. “It’s come to a point now where, as you mature, and after having the ability to experience really rich work that is just so fulfilling, that when you do have the luxury of that option, you want to ask yourself the question, ‘Which one am I more passionate about?’ ” It’s so ingrained in actors to say “yes, yes, yes,” no matter what, but sometimes “a yes has to be a yes to yourself.”
Lately, she’s energized by the idea of “learning to embody characters in a way that gives them justice, gives the story justice.” With “The Chinese Lady,” Apostol shares “a common goal with this playwright, and it’s to tell this story.”
The true story of Afong Moy, her character in “The Chinese Lady,” is only partly known. A Chinese national, she came to America in 1834 as a young woman, reportedly sent by merchants who wanted to use her as an ambassador for China, to spur more demand for Chinese items. Other reports suggest that her family was paid for her time here. Regardless, she was toured around the country as an exotic curiosity for Western eyes. She had a handler and translator, played in the show by Will Dao. Some advertisements of her exhibitions give clues, but after the public lost interest in her as Asian immigration became more common, documentation drops off.
Playwright Lloyd Suh, in his research for the show, “kept coming up against that absence.” He didn’t know if her story could be a play at first. “I didn’t know what to do if she kind of disappears,” he says. “And then there was a point at which I came to realize, ‘Oh, that absence is what the play is about.’ Why isn’t there anything in the record? Why is there no information? And the answer’s obvious: because nobody cared anymore.”
His dual task was to honor both “what she was, but also the absence.”
He and Apostol, working with director Mina Morita, homed in on the idea that Moy thought of herself as a cultural ambassador, that especially at first she thought she was doing her country a great honor. In rehearsal before the show’s first preview, Apostol, performing her shtick the way Moy might before white Americans, speaks with a sense of noblesse oblige, like she’s giving a palace tour. Even when Moy displays her feet, which have been subjected to binding, it’s with shimmering pride. Few people got to do what she did. It marked another chance for her to share her country’s beauty with Americans.
Apostol knows she can’t approach her character with “Rinabeth’s modern influence and savvy knowledge.” Judgment and cynicism don’t make for good acting.
“It is not my practice to judge, because it is not part of my cultural tradition that I learned,” she says. “If anything, talking about something like (foot binding) teaches us cultural humility,” she says. “These people are people. These people have a specific set of traditions and cultures that may seem so foreign, but it’s up to us to accept them for who they are and what they do. Sometimes we have to leave our critical minds out of it.”