Everyone knows of a garage band that eventually got out of the
driveway. Now there is ProperGander Productions, a backyard theater
group that has left the lawn for a real stage.
“Randy (Park) built the stage in his parents’
backyard and we started building these shows back there, which were
really dumb but for some reason really fun,” said David Lee,
producer of ProperGander’s latest work. “People just
started coming. We got at least 70 people in there one time on a
Saturday afternoon watching us do stupid stuff on the
lawn.”
This month, the group’s third original production,
“A Burning Thing,” is at the 2100 Square Foot Theater,
and continues to reel in audiences with what it describes as an
evening of heartfelt comedic one acts.
ProperGander began after the founding members of UCLA’s
10-year-old predominantly Asian American theater group, LCC (Lapu
the Coyote that Cares), graduated, and decided to leave LCC at UCLA
and form a new group.
“I fell in love with the first show I watched LCC do their
first year. It was not all about being Asian. They didn’t
speak to me in political terms. It was more watching people have
fun on stage, and I wanted to be a part of that,” said Naoya
Imanishi, director of “A Burning Thing.”
While the cast of “A Burning Thing” is primarily
Asian, except for one white man, the group does not want to be
limited by an “Asian American” classification. The
20-something founders and actors stress the accessibility of their
plays over their ethnicity.
“Asian American groups like to tell Asian American stories
about immigration and internment for a group that is not very
old,” said Kathleen Tong, who wrote one of the plays in
“A Burning Thing.” “Our goal was to come together
and put Asian Americans on stage, and just tell stories we like,
and stories that we found were important to all people in
general.”
While ProperGander does not want audiences to think their
production is just an “Asian thing,” they do hope to
make the combination of theater and Asians more commonplace, as
Asian Americans are often underrepresented in the media.
“I hope it inspires (our audience) to support, not
necessarily Asian Americans in theater, because our stories are
stories that just happen to have Asian Americans in them, but to
see our faces out there, not just in stereotypical roles in TV and
movies,” Imanishi said.
Young audiences can easily relate to the themes of the stories
in “A Burning Thing.” Tong’s story, “In
Clara Veritas,” is about an aunt, Clara, who is kept from
seeing her niece until she sobers up from her drug and alcohol
addiction. In the scene, Clara meets her niece Sylvia and gets her
to open up.
“There is a saying called “˜in vino veritas: In wine
there is truth.’ People get tipsy and all of a sudden (act
on) behavior that never comes to you normally,” Ton said.
“I based (the scene) on that idea, in Clara there is the
truth, because Clara is Sylvia’s alcohol, she is what gets
Sylvia to talk.”
Their mastery of comedy with truth is one of the reasons
ProperGander has maintained a steady following while other smaller
theater groups fail.
Tong explained that each generation has a sensibility for
comedy. While in the ’70s people were drawn to sketch comedy
like “Saturday Night Live,” today’s college and
post-college audiences’ sensibility for comedy comes from
shared experiences, like childhood crushes and awkward love
triangles.
“People are drawn more to the humor in real life and we
bring that out in our stories,” Imanishi said.
“Granted, some jokes are campy and cheesy, but for the most
part, our stories feel more like scenes of life that happen to be
comedy.”