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A forbidding matriarch and her severely dysfunctional adult children gather at the family home in the Hamptons, where conflicts and family secrets come spilling out. You may feel you’ve seen this play before. You may, in fact, feel that you’ve seen many plays like this.
Leah Nanako Winkler calls them “white people by the water” plays, and she’s written a sharp satirical take on this genre, “Two Mile Hollow,” in which the wealthy and insular white family is played entirely by people of color. As is sometimes the case in these plays, there’s also one actual nonwhite character, a personal assistant whose presence throws the family into confusion.
San Francisco’s Ferocious Lotus Theatre Company now brings “Two Mile Hollow” to Potrero Stage as part of a simultaneous world premiere with Artists at Play in Los Angeles, Chicago’s First Floor Theater and a Minneapolis coproduction by Theater Mu and Mixed Blood Theatre.
The “simultaneous” part isn’t to be taken literally. It indicates sharing world premiere rights, rather than actual simultaneity. The Chicago production ran last October and the Minneapolis one this February, and the Los Angeles one is coming up in the fall.
“About three years ago, I was on a writing retreat,” Winkler recalls. “A season announcement had just happened at this specific major institution, and the majority of the plays that they were producing were plays about white people sitting out in a big house by the water and uncovering their secrets over white wine. And a colleague of mine was like, ‘Oh my god, it’s white people by the water!’ It got me thinking about how many white people by the water plays I’d been ingesting over the years. At first I thought it was really funny, and then I was a little bit harrowed by just how many of these plays are produced each season.”
In fact, Winkler found she knew this sort of story almost by heart.
“As an exercise I started writing one of my own, just to see how ingrained the narrative was in my brain,” she says. “And in one day I had written about 48 pages. Because there’s a formula, right? There’s the manic-depressive brother, there’s the matriarch everybody’s afraid of, the dumpy sister who’s not very dumpy, the successful brother, and then there’s always a phantom or a maid that putters around the house but has no character development. I was disturbed by how well I knew this story and how I had been fed this narrative basically since I could ingest narrative.”
It was Artists at Play that initially suggested the angle of the family being played by actors of color, when the Asian American theater company did a reading early in the play’s development.
“I thought that was sort of the missing ingredient in the play,” Winkler says. “Now I can’t see it any other way. The Chicago production used wigs, and that was very funny, but the Minneapolis production didn’t use wigs, and it was like a slow burn for the audience to realize that they were playing white people. It’s funny both ways, I think. It’s sort of like a mean ‘Hamilton.'”
It’s not all mockery, by any means. There’s a coming of age narrative, focused on the personal assistant that would often be treated as window dressing in this kind of play.
“Asian Americans in New York City only comprise 4 percent of casting decisions on and off Broadway, and that’s only because of ‘The King and I’ and ‘Miss Saigon’ and really old stories that glorify orientalism from a white lens,” Winkler says. “The play shows that everybody can play these roles. It’s fun to play the depressive brother or the angry matriarch. The show earnestly plays into the narrative while making fun of it, and it shows that you don’t have to be white to have meaty acting roles.”
Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.
‘TWO MILE HOLLOW’
By Leah Nanako Winkler, presented by Ferocious Lotus Theatre Company June 23 through July 15
Where: Potrero Stage, 1695 18th St., San Francisco
Tickets: $15-$40; www.ferociouslotus.org
