Asian American Literature Class Hosts One-Minute Play Festival

English teacher Sophie Oberfield’s Asian American Literature class hosted its annual Asian American Literature One-Minute Play Festival on January 7. A group of professional actors from the Asian American theater company Second Generation Productions (2g) came in to perform short plays written by the 24 Asian American Literature students.

The Asian American Literature class immerses students in literature written by people of East Asian, Pacific Islander, South Asian, and Southeast Asian descent. The course allows students to “learn a great, vibrant, and diverse category of literature,” Oberfield said.

Junior Kelly Zhou decided to take the class because of its focus on Asian American culture. “A lot of first-generation students do not really get to learn about their culture because of the generation gap,” Zhou said. “I feel like through this class, I really did learn a lot about the writers and their backgrounds, and that opened up a whole new [...] perspective for me.”

The idea for the one-minute plays was conceived in 2015 when Oberfield took her students to watch a play called “The World of Extreme Happiness” at the Manhattan Theater Club. There, she observed how Victor Maog, the teaching artist at the time, brought in actors to read his students’ monologues. Maog suggested to Oberfield the idea of bringing a short play festival to Stuyvesant and introduced her to 2g.

For the annual event, students were asked to write plays incorporating an Asian or Asian American character. The writing process took students a week and a half of class time and involved several in-class workshop days for students to hear each others’ plays before submitting the final copy. Students also included an author’s note indicating their process and ideal cast for their play. “I'm a playwright myself and I sort of teach a mini playwriting unit. We talk about the difference between fictions, and you do some exercises in class, but the assignment is very open,” Oberfield said.

The eight actors performed 25 plays written by the students in the class. Though they performed from a written script and without the use of props, the actors were able to translate the writing into a performance. “They used their own ways to show the emotion, and that matched what we envisioned,” Zhou said.

The actors were also able to expand on the script and add emotions that were not explicitly stated in the play in order to bring the story to life. This year, the actors decided to add cat behavior to a performance related to cats. “The plays are a lot funnier than the students thought they were going to be because [the] actors make really big decisions about them,” Oberfield said. “The students are often surprised at how seriously the actors take their work.”

The success of the festival is credited to the synergy between the performers and the students. “It's a combination of the actors getting so much energy from the student groups and then the students getting very excited about what's happening in front of them,” Oberfield said.

The plays gave students an opportunity to share what they learned throughout the course while also showcasing their creativity. Junior Bushra Islam’s play was centered around a boy named Bimbo with Asperger’s who had difficulty understanding social cues and learned to accept his disabilities through the help of his peer Naina. “The class really changes your perception of race, ethnicity, class, and gender,” Islam said in an e-mail interview.

Like Zhou, Islam has found the class to be an enjoyable experience. “The Asian American Literature class has definitely brought me to a better sense of myself and my heritage. Especially nowadays with all the racial conflict, it's important to learn more about different ethnicities and understand the untold history of people of different races and cultures,” Islam said.

Though the class is not a creative writing course, Oberfield believes that the one-minute play assignment helps introduce a more diverse range of writing styles to her students. “The goal of the festival is to introduce students to dramatic writing and the magic of theater,” Oberfield said.

By allowing her students to explore playwriting with Asian American characters, Oberfield hopes to expose them to more Asian American representation in plays. “I want students to know that they can write plays and that there are plays that tell stories by and about people who look like them,” Oberfield said.