It was a performance worthy of Buster Keaton (one of Pierce’s heroes), illustrating why the actor received an unprecedented 11 Emmy Award nominations during the show’s 11-year run, winning four of them. Physical comedy came early to Pierce. Growing up, as the youngest of four, his first acting experience occurred in the morning as he came down for breakfast. “At the top of the staircase, I would get shot and fall all the way down,” he told the dramatic arts students at the Massman Theatre in February. “I’d do it most every morning,”
Celebrating 20 Years of Success
contract in its new mainstage: the David Henry Hwang Theater, named for the Tony Awardwinning M. Butterfly playwright, one of many notable East West Players alums. Among the shows Dang has directed at East West are the world premiere of Imelda: A New Musical, the Los Angeles premiere of Passion and the Ovation Award-winning Pacific Overtures and Sweeney Todd. Dang wrote the book and lyrics for Beijing Spring, and was co-writer for The Nisei Widows Club and The Nisei Widows Club: Holiday on Ice. Dang was instrumental in bringing 200 Asian Pacific American arts leaders and educators from across North America to East West in 2006 for The Next Big Bang: The Explosion Of Asian American Theatre conference. That first-time gathering led to the creation of the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists (CAATA), whose fourth “theatre conference/festival” will be held in Philadelphia in October of this year. “We expect people from Great Britain, China, India and Singapore,” Dang said. “Back in the day,” he added, “because we were so small, we didn’t have a lot of opportunities to connect with each other, and now we do. We’re really proud of that.” In 2009, Dang received the prestigious $125,000 James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award for “increasing understanding of and appreciation for California’s diversity
and creating new opportunities for Asian American artists.” East West’s ongoing challenge, Dang said, is to meet a rapidly changing demographic. “As an ethnic-specific organization, East West Players was created to provide opportunities to Asian Americans,” but as the company heads toward its 50th anniversary, he said, “the stories are changing, because the playwrights are living in a different world than back in the ’60s. And yes, we are looking at Korean stories, Laotian stories, Cambodian stories, Vietnamese stories – all of them are so rich in storytelling.” East West has a commitment to tell more interracial stories, too, Dang said, pointing to the growing numbers of Asians in mixed marriages, whose offspring identify as “Hapa” Asian Americans. The company’s current season included A Nice Indian Boy, a new play exploring issues of Hindu tradition and interracial gay marriage, written by Madhuri Shekar, “who just graduated from the USC MFA playwriting program,” Dang noted. With East West’s production of USC alumnus Shane Sakhrani’s A Widow of No Importance in 2011, “we have world premiered two plays by USC graduates right out of the program. “There’s a great pipeline that USC is providing not only to theatre, but to the entire entertainment industry,” Dang said. “We’re proud to be part of that process and success.”
USC Photo/Gus Ruelas
Actor David Hyde Pierce’s visit to the USC School of Dramatic Arts began with the showing of a wordless clip of Pierce as Niles Crane in the hit TV series Frasier. In a few brilliant minutes, Pierce escalates a tiny worry about the crease on his pants into a disaster involving a couch fire, a ruined dinner and a befuddled dog.
he said, savoring the opportunity to fall and die slightly differently each time. Pierce was in Los Angeles directing the 2013 Tony Award-winning best play, Christopher Durang’s Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike at the Mark Taper Forum. Pierce played Vanya in the Broadway production and directed three of his Broadway colleagues and three others new to the play. Answering questions from students and Assistant Professor of Theatre Practice John De Mita (one of his roommates at Yale, it turns out), Pierce was generous in sharing observations on the craft. Students asked whether he watches himself in dailies (“Yes, it doesn’t bother me, it doesn’t throw me”), what acting medium he prefers (“I love the theatre, I love having that live audience”) and about his influences (“Buster Keaton, Alec Guinness, John Cleese”). Fans regularly tell him that his performances or projects he’s been in have gotten them through tough times. “I didn’t go into it as a service profession,” he said, but he appreciates how theatre expands how people feel about the world or think about themselves. Studying philosophy and literary criticism in college “deeply embedded in me that everything has to do with theatre.” He told his attentive audience: “The whole richness of life feeds what you do.”
David Hyde Pierce, a four-time Emmy winner on Frasier, reflects on his life in the theatre.
His Career Began With a Fall Down the Stairs By Allison Engel
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commercial media. Dang had faced no stigma playing lead roles in the freely diverse atmosphere of the USC School of Dramatic Arts, but as an Asian American actor then, he was aware that such opportunities “in the real world, were very slim.” The mentoring that Dang had received at USC continued under Mako. “He said it would be a lot of hard work, and that the average actor is rejected a lot, but an actor of Asian heritage is going to face even more of that,” Dang said. “He wanted to make sure that I had a thick skin.” Acting in plays and musicals, developing his directorial and producing chops, Dang took the reins at East West in 1993, following founding artistic director Mako and his successor, film veteran Nobu McCarthy. Guidance from both – Mako for his artistry and Nobu, in part, for her business acumen – was invaluable, Dang said. “I learned an incredible amount from both of them.” Applying those lessons helped Dang guide East West’s transition to an Actors Equity union 6