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Photograph by Dai Sugano
It looks like Saratoga playwright Joyce Hsu is well into her second career.
Playwright gains recognition in Asia and the United States
By Steve Enders
Perhaps she'll be the scriptwriting equivalent to novelist Amy Tan, a local Chinese-American breaking down socio-cultural barriers through literature--this increasingly popular Saratoga playwright probably wouldn't mind so much.
Joyce Hsu, mother of three and longtime Saratoga resident, is already an internationally known playwright, and is having her scripts produced across the United States as well. That's not bad for someone who's only written three plays.
This fall, Hsu will have her fourth play produced, and is exploring new styles to attract a new audience--an English-speaking one.
Hsu pens all her plays in Chinese. They're performed by Chinese actors and directed by a Chinese director. Hsu is a native of mainland China.
The plays are produced by local company Bridge and Gate Productions, which organizes sets and actors as well as publicity and program printing. The company's goal, Hsu says, is to help break down social walls and bridge the gap between China and the United States.
During her youth Hsu moved to Taiwan, where she finished high school and then college. She went on to receive an advanced degree in chemistry more than 20 years ago at Cal Tech, and has lived in the states ever since, occasionally hopping the pond to visit home.
Then she had a family here while working in labs at UC-Berkeley and at Stanford University. It was time to slow down.
"Now they're grown, and I picked up this hobby of writing scripts," Hsu says. "Nothing can prevent a chemist from writing, and I always liked theater. It seems very natural that I try this."
She repeatedly wows thousands of audience members on stages in Mountain View and Santa Clara. Her last play, which ran three nights, brought in 1,500 people.
It all happened through contacts Hsu has kept since going to college. Through alumni organizations, she's kept up with directors and producers who help her put on the plays. Hsu also took a class in Taiwan to learn how to write and format a script before getting serious about writing.
The first script she ever wrote, a comedy, garnered attention in Taiwan, after it won first prize in a contest she entered at a Taiwanese television station.
She won a cash prize and critical acclaim, and for two years the station had rights to produce the script for TV, which it never did.
"It wasn't a big award, but was something that made me have more confidence," she says. "It could be made into a movie script; that's my dream."
Since then, she's won the rights back, and it's played on stages in Taiwan with a professional theater company. Her other plays have entertained audiences in amateur playhouses in North Carolina, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. This year, another professional company is picking up one of her scripts for a month-long run in Shanghai.
Her first play is called "Who's the Winner?" and is simply a comedy about happiness. Her four male leads have it all--money, nice cars and homes and beautiful wives. They're also bogged down with relationship problems, and everything comes crumbling down around them. In the first scene, all of the men die.
The second scene takes place in the afterlife, and the men realize how truly unsuccessful they'd been, so they decide to come back, but as women in Singapore.
"Comedies just for laughs are really bad. They just force you to laugh, they don't make you laugh on the inside," Hsu says.
Besides this highly successful comedy, Hsu has done a tragedy and a fictional historical play as well.
Her next play is another comedy, and is scheduled to run in October. Already, Hsu says, she's working with a translator who will project subtitles on a screen next to the stage.
"I don't know how well it will work, but I want an English-speaking audience to come take a look," she says."
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
