Primary Stages Presents World Premiere of Charles Busch’s “Olive and Bitter Herbs” at 59E59 Theaters, 7/26-9/3

Charles Busch at home in New York. (Photo by Lia Chang)

New York, NY (July 20, 2011) – Primary Stages (Casey Childs, Founder & Executive Producer; Andrew Leynse, Artistic Director; Elliot Fox, Managing Director) launches its 27th season with the World Premiere of a work commissioned by the company, the new comedy, Olive and the Bitter Herbs by Charles Busch directed by Mark Brokaw.

The cast features Dan Butler as Trey, David Garrison as Robert, Julie Halston as Wendy, Marcia Jean Kurtz as Olive and Richard Masur as Sylvan.

Performances begin Tuesday, July 26, 2011 for a limited run through Saturday, September 3, 2011 at Primary Stages at 59E59 Theaters (59 East 59th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues). Opening night is Tuesday, August 16, 2011 at 7:00 p.m.

In Olive and the Bitter Herbs, the latest comedy from Tony-nominated playwright Charles Busch (The Divine Sister, The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife), actress Olive Fisher sees a ghost in her mirror, but that’s the least of her problems. Her radiator’s broken, the couple next door stink up her apartment with exotic cheeses, and the highlight of her long career was a sausage commercial in the ’80s. While she’s not the most popular tenant, her neighbors invite themselves over and she finds herself hosting a Passover Seder. But are Olive’s guests there to see her or the mysterious man in her mirror? Olive and the Bitter Herbs is a comedy about connecting to the people in our lives – those with us and those who have passed on.

The creative team includes Anna Louizos (Set), Suzy Benzinger (Costumes), Mary Louise Geiger (Lights) and John Gromada (Sound and Original Music). The Production Stage Manager is William H. Lang.

Performances for Olive and the Bitter Herbs are Tuesday – Thursday at 7:00 p.m., Fridays at 8:00 p.m., Saturdays at 2:00 p.m. & 8:00 p.m., with Sunday matinees at 3:00 p.m. on July 31, August 7, 14 & 21, and special Wednesday matinees at 2:00 p.m. on August 24 & 31. Following the public performances on August 18 & 25, there will be a special “Artist/Audience Talkback” for the attendees of those performances.

Single tickets for Olive and the Bitter Herbs are priced at $45 for the first two weeks (July 26 – August 7) and $65 for all remaining performances (August 9 – September 3). Tickets may be purchased by calling Ticket Central at (212) 279-4200, online at www.primarystages.org, or in person at the 59E59 THEATERS Box Office. Group Tickets (10+) are $35 each for the first two weeks (July 26 – August 7) and $45 each for all remaining performances (August 9 – September 3), and are available by calling (212) 840-9705, ext. 204. Please visit the website at www.primarystages.org, or call (212) 840-9705 for additional information.

The special Pay What You Can ticket offer (now in its fourth season at Primary Stages) will be available for the first two preview performances on July 26 & 27 at 7:00 p.m. Tickets go on sale two hours prior to curtain at a minimum of $1 per ticket and are limited to two (2) tickets per person, cash only, no change given, must provide email and mailing addresses and will be available on a first-come, first-served basis, only at the 59E59 Theater Box Office.

For theater patrons 35 and under, Primary Stages offers specially priced $20 tickets (maximum two tickets per valid ID). Advance tickets are available through Ticket Central using code PS35. Failure to present a valid ID will result in an additional fee. All tickets are subject to availability.

All text, graphics, articles & photographs: © 2000-2011 Lia Chang Multimedia. All rights reserved. All materials contained on this site are protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast without the prior written permission of Lia Chang. You may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice from copies of the content. For permission, please contact Lia at liachangpr@gmail.com.

Other Articles by Lia Chang:
Photos: Rick Shiomi Checks out Performing Arts Playwrights Series in the Asian American Pacific Islander Collection of Library of Congress; Attends “Asian American Plays for a New Generation” Book Signing in NY
Lia Chang Theater Portfolio at Library of Congress Features Photos of Thom Sesma’s Makeup Transformation as Scar in Disney’s The Lion King Las Vegas, Robert Lee and Leon Ko’s Heading East Starring BD Wong, David Henry Hwang’s Chinglish, and Samrat Chakrabarti and Sanjiv Jhaveri’s Bakwas Bumbug!
“In Rehearsal”: Lia Chang Theater Portfolio Features Rehearsal Photos of David Henry Hwang’s Broadway Bound Chinglish and Samrat Chakrabarti and Sanjiv Jhaveri’s “Bakwas Bumbug! on View in the Asian Division Reading Room at Library of Congress through 8/2
Photos: Playwright David Henry Hwang in rehearsal at the Goodman Theatre for World Premiere of Chinglish
David Henry Hwang’s Chinglish is Broadway Bound this Fall; Goodman Theatre Photo Feature
Photos: Christmas in June w/ Samrat Chakrabarti and Sanjiv Jhaveri’s “Bakwas Bumbug” at The Wild Project in NY
Spotlight on Shanghai Moon’s Thom Sesma
My portrait of “Thom Sesma’s Makeup Transformation into Scar in The Lion King” on view in HHC’s New York City: IN FOCUS, Vol. 2
Multimedia: Exclusive photos and video of Disney’s The Lion King Las Vegas -In the Makeup Chair with Thom Sesma
Photo Call: BD Wong and the Cast of Heading East at the Asia Society
Photos: André De Shields leads the cast of Charles Smith’s Knock Me A Kiss at The National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, NC, 8/2-8/4
Photos: “How To Succeed” stars Daniel Radcliffe, Rose Hemingway & John Larroquette at Lord & Taylor Fifth Ave
Photos: Phylicia Rashad, Michael McElroy, Marva Hicks in Broadway Inspirational Voices “Wondrous Grace” Concert in NY
Photos: Willie Reale, Frances McDormand, Lewis Black, Bela Fleck, Renee Goldsberry, Duncan Sheik, Lisa Benavides, Abigail Washburn, Tim Blake Nelson at The 52nd Street Project Benefit
Photos: David Duchovny, John Earl Jelks, Amanda Peet, Tracee Chimo at Opening Night Party of Neil LaBute’s Break of Noon
Multimedia: Promises, Promises’ Stars Kristin Chenoweth and Sean Hayes at Lord & Taylor Fifth Ave
Click here for the Lia Chang Articles Archive and here for the Lia Chang Photography Website.

Lia Chang Photo by Brianne Michelle Photography

Lia Chang is an actor, performance and fine art botanical photographer, and an award-winning multimedia journalist.

As a photographer and videographer, Lia collaborates with artists, organizations and companies in establishing their documentary photo archive and social media presence. She has been documenting her colleagues and contemporaries in the arts, fashion and journalism since making her stage debut as Liat in the National Tour of South Pacific, with Robert Goulet and Barbara Eden. Lia currently plays Nurse Lia on “One Life to Live”. She has appeared in Wolf, New Jack City, A Kiss Before Dying, King of New York, Big Trouble in Little China, The Last Dragon, Taxman and “New York Undercover”.

Selections of Lia’s archive of Asian Pacific Americans in the arts, fashion, journalism, politics and space are now in the newly created LIA CHANG THEATER PORTFOLIO in the ASIAN PACIFIC AMERICAN PERFORMING ARTS COLLECTION housed in the Library of Congress Asian Division’s Asian American Pacific Islander Collection.

Lia’s portraits and performance photos have appeared in Vanity Fair, Gourmet, German Elle, Women’s Wear Daily, The Paris Review, TV Guide, Daily Variety, Interior Design, American Theatre, Broadwayworld.com, Life & Style, OUT, New York Magazine, InStyle, Timeout.com, Villagevoice.com, Playbill.com, Theatermania.com, thelmagazine.com, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, USA Today, The Boston Globe, New York Times and Washington Post. A former syndicated arts and entertainment columnist for KYODO News, Lia is the New York Bureau Chief for AsianConnections.com. She writes about culture, style and Asian American issues for a variety of publications and this Backstage Pass with Lia Chang blog.

Lia Chang: Spotlight on Shanghai Moon’s Thom Sesma

Thom Sesma as General Gong Fei in Charles Busch's SHANGHAI MOON at the Bay Street Theatre (Photo by Lia Chang)

AsianConnections’ editor Lia Chang sat down with Thom Sesma on the set of the Bay Street Theatre production of Shanghai Moon in Sag Harbor, where he is playing the handsome, sexy and insatiable General Gong Fei, to talk about his artistic influences, life-changing experiences and working as an Asian American actor in the theater.

Equally at home on the legit stage as well as in the musical theater, the versatile actor was last seen on Broadway as the seductive powerhouse Captain Ahrab wielding a whip and making women swoon, in the Tharp/Dylan project The Times They are A-Changin‘. On and off Broadway and on tour, he has appeared in Miss Saigon, Titanic, Search and Destroy, Man of La Mancha, Sweeney Todd, Cymbeline, Rashomon, Baba Goya, In a Pig’s Valise, As Thousands Cheer, Othello and Ivanov.

Last Fall, he played opposite Kathleen Chalfant in the EPIC Theatre Ensemble’s acclaimed production of Howard Barker’s A Hard Heart, directed by Will Pomerantz.

He recently starred in a reading of Jeanne Sakata’s Dawn’s Light: The Journey of Gordon Hirabayashi, a one-character play inspired by the true story of 24-year old college student Gordon Hirabayashi, who during World War II, openly defied and legally challenged U.S. government orders to forcibly remove and and imprison over 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry into desolate concentration camps.

Born in Sasebo, Japan and raised in San Diego, California, the actor credits his father, a naval engineer, for his introduction to and appreciation of the performing arts. A return to Japan for two years during his youth is when Sesma first saw Japanese performers on stage, and experienced John Wayne on the silver screen.

Lia: Who inspired you to be in the arts?

Thom: My father. I grew up in San Diego. There was a radio station called KSDO, and on Sundays at 1pm they would play something called The Sunday Show. They would play scores to musicals. That was my introduction to the theater. My dad listened to it every Sunday.

The first show he took me to was in Japan. It was a movie, but it was in a big giant cinema, like a Radio City Music Hall. There was revue, a live revue before and in between the movies. I remember that they did the dances from West Side Story, which was astounding, all Japanese performers.

The first movie my dad took me to prior to that was The Longest Day, a 20th Century Fox epic with an all-star international cast of actors- French, German and American. I was six years old. John Wayne was in that movie. My dad was so excited to see that film (he had read the book). We were living in Japan at the time, but he didn’t wait for the film to show up on the Navy base. We saw it in a Japanese theater, but because there were French and German actors in it, it was side titled, with Japanese letters on the side. My dad remembered the story well enough to tell me what was going on. I remembered thinking that it was a really terrific movie.

Years later, I was living in New York performing in my first Broadway show, La Cage Aux Folles. It was June 28, 1985. The Regency Theater was showing The Longest Day. I had a performance that night. I went to see it in the afternoon. In the middle of the film, when I saw John Wayne, I thought he was good, very natural, very at ease. If you buy the character he’s playing, you buy what he’s doing as an actor. I sat there thinking, this movie is really good.

It’s a perfect day, I am here living in New York, doing a Broadway show, and I owe it all to my dad, because of the Sunday Show, because of John Wayne, because of seeing the movie in Japan. He had just been out the year before to see me in La Cage. I had this epiphany. I thought it was just so amazing. And as I had that epiphany, my dad died suddenly of a heart attack in San Diego. I thought that was a fitting kind of farewell.

Lia: What was your first paid acting job?

Thom: I played Bob Crachit in the San Diego Theater Repertory production of A Christmas Carol when I was in my 20′s. My second paid acting job was playing Wang Ta in the Rogers and Hammerstein version of Flower Drum Song at the San Diego Civic Light Opera with the fabulous Pat Suzuki in 1980.

I’ve had the good fortune of working with amazing people, the best people in the business. Along with that I’ve had the chance to see and to get to know both sides of the fence. It’s difficult not to talk about the opportunities that don’t come our way because we’re people of color. And yet, right now, that doesn’t seem to dissuade an enormous number of Asian Americans who are becoming actors.

Lia: Written by and starring the divine Charles Busch, Shanghai Moon is set in Shanghai, circa 1931. You play the notorious Chinese warlord General Gong Fei, who Lady Sylvia Allington (Charles Busch), the beautiful, young American born wife of an aged British diplomat falls for, and begins a fatal love affair. The cast is rounded out by longtime Busch collaborator Julie Halston, Jarlath Conroy, Jodi Lin and Gordana Rashovich, and directed with a firm hand by Carl Andress. Tell me about your experience with the show.

Thom: I am having a fantastic time in Shanghai Moon, Charles Busch’s homage to exotic melodramas of the 1930s. The play is a nod to all of those, some great and some tacky, ‘white damsel in distress in the Forbidden East’ movies like the Bitter Tea of General Yen, Shanghai Express and The Letter.

To my credits portraying authentic Asian leading men such as “King” in King and I, “Prince” in Chu Chem, “Engineer” in Miss Saigon, “Priest” in Rashomon, I now add the inscrutable, cruel and sensual forbidden man of the East, General Gong Fei. It is my own homage to the great cinematic exotic villains portrayed by authentic Asian performers such as Christopher Lee, Warner Oland, Nils Asther, George Sanders, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, Conrad Veidt… oh yeah, and some guy named Sessue Hayakawa. Gong Fei is an amalgam of all the sinister dangerous Asian men whether they be crimelords or emperors that the invariable white heroine falls in love with.

Charles is a bit of a film historian, so the archetypes are drawn from that canon of literature. There’s nothing new or original about General Gong Fei, which makes it an absolute delight, because the joy in doing it as well as it can be done, is with a very contemporary self-conscious twist on it. Gong Fei is fun to play.

Click on the slide show below to view photos of Thom in Shanghai Moon. Photography by AsianConnections’ Editor Lia Chang

Lia: What is Gong Fei’s journey in Shanghai Moon?

Thom: It’s a classic tale, someone comes from another land and changes their world. She introduces the whole concept of love. I’m a warlord, but what I really am is a drug lord. One of the most power drug lords of Shanghai.

At the beginning of the play, to consolidate my power, I am trying to eliminate my most dangerous rival, an American woman of questionable heritage. In the middle of this, Lady Sylvia Allington and her husband are my house guests for a period of two weeks. From the moment I see this painting of Lady Sylvia, I realize she has needs that are similar to mine. It throws my world off its axis. My journey is to continue my original path, to consolidate my power in Shanghai, and not be distracted by other things. Often times, when the world is thrown off its axis, nothing is the same.

Shanghai Moon is also about identity. In a goofy way, I could say Shanghai Moon is the apex of my career as an Asian American actor. It is a shameless satirical homage to all the offensive stereotypes and patronizing characters that we’re asked to play without question. Because we now get to embrace this character, ridicule this character and all the literary and psychological tropes that come with it. The great thing about it is that it’s not isolated.

Lia: What is it like to play Charles’ object of desire?

Thom: Charles is dreamy. He makes the job so easy. It is like the script itself. Very little work is required. You just have to show up. Charles is very easy to fall in love with.

Lia: Dawn’s Light was only a staged reading, but as a gifted storyteller, you were successful at creating a very real environment and had the audience in the palm of your hand as you portrayed a multiplicity of characters. How did the project come about?

Thom: Several months after I did Howard Barker’s A Hard Heart last Fall for the Epic Theatre, I got an email from Zak Berkman (director of Artistic programming for the EPIC Theatre), asking if I would be interested in taking part in a developmental reading of a play called Dawn’s Light by Jeanne Sakata.

I worked with Jeanne years ago in the Lincoln Center Director’s Lab, and I absolutely adored her as a person. I had no idea she had started writing.

I knew about Gordon Hirabayashi as one of three Japanese American men who defied Executive Order 9066, the mandate for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Min Yasui, Fred Korematsu and Gordon, all for three separate reasons decided that they would fight the internment order in court, and subsequently they served prison terms. Very qualified prison terms. Each of them had a very interesting story to tell.

Gordon’s story really interested me because, he was a Quaker and a pacifist. His fight was almost passive aggressive, which is very Japanese.

Framed like a mystery, the essential moral of the story is not so much that Gordon is a symbol for defiance, but that he’s an individual. The thing that one is left with at the end of Dawn’s Light is that behind the face of that Asian man behind bars, behind barbed wire, is not a symbol, but a human being with a wife, with children, with feelings, with an interrupted university career, with a spiritual mandate. It’s not just a story, it’s who he is.

I jumped at the chance to work with EPIC again. They are a terrific company whose mandate is education and development of new works that engage the audience in civic discourse. With a segment of the population isolated and demonized during World War II, and now with the regular practice of isolating and demonizing various ethnic groups as a result of the War on Terror, I found this show to be very timely.

I hooked up with an amazing director named Lisa Rothe, and the reading was co-presented by EPIC and the Lark Play Development Series. Slated as a table read, it ultimately turned into a fully staged workshop performance at the reading. How that managed to happen in ten hours of rehearsal, I will never know. It was a bit of a miracle, but sometimes God smiles down on those of us who stumble onto a noble project.

Lia: In 2006, you starred on Broadway in the Twyla Tharp/ Bob Dylan project The Times They are A-Changin’, and won the San Diego Drama Critics Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Musical. What was your experience with Ms. Tharp?

Thom: The Times They are A-Changin’ changed my life. I understudied the role in San Diego that I eventually took over. Working with Twyla Tharp, well, she is someone who doesn’t just welcome the way that I work, but demands the way I was naturally inclined to work, but was never allowed to.

I think that it is really important for young people to remember when they become actors or artists, or they go into any field that is creative, is to never wait for permission to work. You just start working. That’s how Twyla is. She has a amazing book , The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life. It starts off with the most beautiful sentence, I walk into a white room. That’s it, every room you walk into as a creative person is a big blank white room and it’s up to you to fill it. Twyla worked that way during the show, during the rehearsal process.

Lia: What is your next project?

Thom: A play called Durango by Julia Cho at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. I just got offered this job, yesterday. I took the jitney into New York yesterday, auditioned and took the jitney back. Upon my arrival in Sag Harbor, my agent called to say they were making a offer. It was a random event, another gift of the universe. All the signs in the universe point to this confluence of energies and souls.

Julia Cho is a brilliant playwright. Her material does the work for you, you just have to be committed to it. The character is a father who is laid off. He is a man in his late fifties who is alienated from his two sons, both of whom are college aged. What’s remarkable is that it’s not an Asian American story, it is a classic American road story. He takes them on a road trip to Durango, Colorado. It’s beautifully written.

Don’t miss the wonderful cast of this revival of Shanghai Moon at the Bay Street Theatre on the Long Wharf in Sag Harbor. Performances run through June 29 and tickets can be purchased online at http://www.baystreet.org or by calling (631) 725-9500.