An Interview with CAUGHT Director Desdemona Chiang

Intiman Theatre, March 2019

” I’m very story-focused and plot-focused — get me some good characters and relationships and I can make a good story.”

Desdemona Chiang
Photo by Naomi Ishisaka.

Known for her visceral, no-nonsense approach with her distinct point of view as an immigrant and Asian American woman, Desdemona Chiang tackles theatre making with the questions, “What is the thing that we’re not talking about? What is the thing that we think we’re talking about, but we’re not talking about, or no one’s ever bothered to think about?”

Here, arts marketer/writer Joann Natalia Aquino interviews Desdemona Chiang, theatre director of Chinese descent and co-founder of Azeotrope, a Seattle-based theatre company specializing in new work that focuses on bringing voice and representation to the marginalized and invisible.

You were born in Taipei, Taiwan and migrated to the United States when you were three years old. How do you identify in America?
It’s interesting. I actually discovered this through a friend of mine: I think I identify as Chinese and American, and not Chinese-American. It’s not about a hyphenated hybrid identity and more of a dual identity. It’s something I’m still figuring out… For a long time, I never really called myself Chinese American, I would just say, “I’m Chinese.” Even though I’m more fluent in English than I am in Mandarin, but Mandarin is my first language. I still very much feel like I don’t fit in, but at the same time, I’m quite mainstream and I’m very assimilated.  It’s weird. I’ve always felt very centered in my identity and partially because I grew up in an immigrant community and I never felt like an “other” growing up.

How did the directorship for CAUGHT come about?
I’ve been a big fan of Jennifer Zeyl (Intiman’s Artistic Director) for a long time and I thought I would love to work with her someday. In the last couple of years, we got a chance to know each other socially in Seattle and we had talked about trying to find a way for me to work with Intiman and it was just a matter of the right play, the right time and scheduling, and this happened to be the one that worked out.

Why Christopher Chen’s CAUGHT?
We went through many plays and CAUGHT came up, but it was already done by the Seattle Public Theatre in 2016, so we let it go for a while and it sat on a shelf and we read more plays. But this play was just so attractive and it’s so compelling and really useful right now because we’re in this moment of questioning truth and challenging paradigms of who you trust, who do you not trust… It felt very appropriate to do it right now and we’re hoping that it will ring differently in 2019.  

How is CAUGHT different from all the other plays you’ve directed?
I think CAUGHT itself is a really unique play. Christopher Chen is one of the smartest playwrights I’ve ever known in my entire life. He’s interested in ideas and his writing is really smart and also taps into something about an existential fear that is really interesting to me. There’s also something a little sinister about Christopher’s writing — that things aren’t what you think they are and people mean more than what they’re saying. There’s always a little tinge of suspicion when I read Chris’s plays. CAUGHT is about going to a dark place that you didn’t expect… This play is a bit more disorienting. With CAUGHT, a lot of it is working with space: our relationship to space, our relationship to theatre and theatre going. One of the primary premise is that the play is about a visual artist, so the play embraces both theatre and visual art as part of its language.

How would you describe your directing style?
I think I’m a very actor-centric director. I tend to focus a lot on relationships and circumstance. There are some directors who are visionaries and I don’t think I’m a visionary. I’m very story-focused and plot-focused — get me some good characters and relationships and I can make a good story.

What can the audience expect from this production?
They can expect to be really confused, in a good way. They can expect to have perceptions challenged. They can expect to be surprised.

Interview by Joann Natalia Aquino, a Pinay, an arts marketer, a publicist and freelance lifestyle writer.