Lloyd Suh’s “The Far Country,” playing at Berkeley Rep, recalls Chinese Exclusion Act and its bitter aftermath.
There’s no shortage of shameful chapters in our nation’s history, but one that’s discussed today less often than many others is the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Suh’s new play “The Far Country,” now getting its West Coast premiere in Berkeley, explores some of the far-reaching impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act on immigrant families. Set in 1909 in the wake of the San Francisco Earthquake, the play deals with the phenomenon of what’s sometimes called “paper sons,” immigrants with forged documents establishing them as children of U.S. citizens.
“It is a play about an unlikely family during the exclusion era, and what people had to do to survive to live in America, to build something at a time when the country didn’t want them,” Suh says. “And practically speaking, it’s a look at the experience of people who were detained on Angel Island in the pursuit of a dream of a beautiful life in America, and the struggles and the work that they had to do in order to make steps towards attaining that over generations.
“A thing that I’ve been grappling with in general around history is how much of our stories are lost to us, both because history forgets but also because we don’t share it,” Suh says. “A lot of my peers and I, as second-generation Asian American immigrants, no matter what country of origin our families come from, there is a sense of ‘leave the past in the past.’ It’s too painful to talk about. You don’t need to know. Move on.
“The Far Country” comes to Berkeley Rep fresh from its world premiere at New York’s Atlantic Theater Company, where it was directed by former California Shakespeare Theater artistic director Eric Ting. “I think anybody who takes the extraordinary step to change their lives completely and move to a new place where they don’t speak the language and they don’t have family or roots, it’s a self-sacrificing act that ultimately dreams of the future,” Suh says.
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