Openly stating, “No fats, femmes, or Asians” (“no FFA” for short, and sometimes the more expansively exclusionary “No Asians, no Blacks”) was not so long ago no big deal—prevalent enough on dating apps to make it the primary example cited by Zach Stafford, former chief content officer at Grindr, of the kind of “discriminatory language” that was officially banned from the app as of September 19, 2018. The phrase was justified as a statement of the dater’s preference rather than his racism, fatphobia, and misogyny. “It reconstructs the Asian identity as a ‘type,’ allowing this ‘preference’ to be interchangeable with one’s racial and ethnic identity,” theorized one author in Sparks Magazine. Yet beyond the individuals who said it, perhaps more deplorable is the community that accepted it. 

“Why is white the primary color of gay male beauty?” asked Jimmy Nguyen in the Advocate in 2011. Noting that the bars, parties, and gyms of elite gay culture are predominantly white, Nguyen describes the unique irony of being a racial minority within a historically oppressed minority community that nevertheless upholds white supremacy. “In part, that’s because racial minority groups still are not fully integrated into the queer sphere. It’s also because power in America (gay or straight) has historically been concentrated in white hands. But mostly, it’s because the men considered most attractive, by the most people in our country, are ‘all-American’ white,” he writes, admitting, “The irony for me is that I’m one of those gaysians mainly attracted to white men.”

In a culture that stereotypes Asians as passive and submissive—the antithesis to ideals of whiteness, wealth, and heroic muscularity—what’s a gaysian to do to find love? And what happens when the thing that you obsess over looks nothing like you? “Growing up in the 80s, when I went out to the bar with my Caucasian friends, I kind of disappeared. I didn’t really exist for other people at the bar because that’s not what they were looking for,” says Alan Muraoka, Sesame Street actor and Emmy Award–winning director of Token Theatre’s first full-length live production, premiering this week at A Red Orchid Theatre. 

Zac Efron
6/20-7/21: Thu-Sat 7 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Wed 6/26 7 PM (celebration of Gay Pride Chicago) and Mon 7/1 7 PM (industry), no performances Sun 6/30 or Thu 7/4; A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N. Wells, tokentheatre.net, $40 (industry/seniors $25, students/military $20

Forty years later, David and Wai, two gay Asian men in their 40s stymied by racism, the pandemic, and the mundane woes of modern life and dating apps, are still struggling in David Rhee’s play Zac Efron, cowritten by Wai Yim. David (Hansel Tan) wants two kids, a white picket fence, and a husband who looks like Troy Bolton (Efron’s character in High School Musical). Wai (Yim) is a YouTube influencer who reads tarot online to legions of horny horoscope enthusiasts. A contemporary gaysian Bert and Ernie, their bickering and bantering is the crux of a play that makes light of a demographic as specific as astrologically obsessed queens with an online German housewife following, and as broad as second-generation Americans desperate to fit in with their peers and win the approval of their immigrant parents. They’re just two guys looking for love in an onerous world. 

Zac Efron could not be more different than what Rhee originally envisioned for Token Theatre’s debut production: an all-Asian edition of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. “Asian Americans kept on being told we’re not part of this town, we’re not part of this country, so my idea was to cast East Asian and South Asian people and have them dress up initially in their traditional cultural clothing. As they become more Americanized, little bits and pieces of their costumes start getting ripped off, and you see them wearing jeans underneath. It ends in death, and I wanted that to be a parallel to the death of their culture,” he says. 

The concept stemmed from a 2006 Time Out Chicago article on the whiteness of Chicago theater that quoted one casting director saying that no Asian actors from Chicago could be found for a recent production. “The Asian actors in Chicago were furious—we’re right here!” Rhee recalls. “This isn’t considered our town—so I’m going to do the most traditional American play as pansori, where the only thing accompanying it is a drum, and this person is almost screaming the lines to say, ‘This is our town.’”

“If you look at most of my plays, they always end in what Aristotle calls a ‘scene of suffering’—Aristotle believed that every play has to have some sort of scene of suffering, whether it’s someone’s hand being cut off, i.e., The Empire Strikes Back, or death,” says Rhee, a Broadway veteran who teaches English literature at Phillips Exeter Academy. “This time we decided to go the opposite of every instinct that we had. Believe it or not, [Zac Efron] was a tragedy initially.” 

Encouraged by a friend to find the happy ending rarely granted in mainstream “Asian” narratives (Miss Saigon: suicide. The King and I: death), Rhee saw and chose to celebrate the beauty of his collaborator. “Wai is such a fantastic actor. I have worked with him. I have seen him and the roles he would get. You see what he looks like—he’s a very specific type, and people were not giving him a chance. Plus he has that accent [Yim is from Hong Kong]. So there’s this one line, ‘What about me? Tall, lanky, with a chinky accent. Do you know how many roles I’m right for?’ and he says, ‘All. Of. Them.’”

“What drew me was the humor,” says Muraoka, who directed two online productions of Zac Efron for Token. “In the canon of Asian American plays, there’s not many comedies—there’s even fewer gay comedies, and gay romantic comedies basically don’t exist.” 

“We don’t have gay Asian plays that feature two Asian men without any special circumstances—it’s not the Cultural Revolution or the Vietnam War,” adds Yim. “Do future generations have to keep doing Miss Saigon and The King and I? There are only like five plays that people do, and they’re always about family trauma.”

“Tragedies can be funny, too,” says Rhee. “I mean, look at Chekhov.”