Token Theatre Makes Its Debut with 'Zac Efron'

Forty years after the bars, parties, and gyms of elite gay culture were predominantly white, David Rhee's play 'Zac Efron' is still struggling with racism.

In the realm of online dating, openly stating preferences such as “No fats, femmes, or Asians” (“no FFA” for short) was once commonplace. This exclusionary language, sometimes expanded to include Blacks (“No Asians, no Blacks”), was prevalent enough on dating apps like Grindr to serve as the primary example cited by former chief content officer Zach Stafford when announcing the app’s ban on discriminatory language as of September 19, 2018. The phrase was often justified as a statement of the dater’s preference rather than an expression of racism, fatphobia, or misogyny. However, as one author theorized in Sparks Magazine, “It reconstructs the Asian identity as a ‘type,’ allowing this ‘preference’ to be interchangeable with one’s racial and ethnic identity.” Perhaps even more deplorable than the individuals who used such language was the community that accepted it.

“Why is white the primary color of gay male beauty?” asked Jimmy Nguyen in the Advocate in 2011. Observing that the bars, parties, and gyms of elite gay culture are predominantly white, Nguyen highlighted 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 wrote, 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.

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 from 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 for Our Town stemmed from a 2006 Time Out Chicago article on the whiteness of Chicago theater that quoted one casting director as 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