Review
Happy Birthday!
by Diane Yen-Mei Wong
Asian Ameican Theater Co., SF
2/95

"It's been a rough couple of years for the financially strapped Asian American Theater Company. Actually, it's been a rough couple of decades. AATC never has seemed to have had a budget adequate to account for the number of productions it's mounted each season for 22 years.

"Fittingly, for a company that has been an unusually rich trove of world premieres, Birthday is a new play by a new playwright. It is not, however, a successful one. Wong, a San Francisco-based columnist for Honolulu's Hawaii Herald, seems to know who her characters are and where she wants them to go - but not how to get them there...

"Birthday is a play about women coping with various forms of sexism - principally, 2,000 year-old Chinese cultural attitude about women, but also sexism in the American workplace and, to a certain extent, homophobia. The plot, however, is only a shopworn device to bring the characters together."

Robert Hurwitt, SF Examiner

"Happy Birthday!, a first play by journalist/editor Diane Yen-Mei Wong, is more like a magazine piece than a piece of theater. In this world premiere at the Asian American Theater, four Asian American women gather at a Carmel retreat to celebrate a birthday and runs through a laundry list of concerns about marriage, career, aging, sexual orientation, family and other matters. The play covers the bases of its issues without making the characters or their dilemmas dramatically involving."

Steven Winn, SF Chronicle

These two reviews are available in their entirety on the web, at the SF Chronicle/Examiner's web site at www.sfgate.com. Use the search engine; the Chronicle review is on 2/21/1995; the Examiner review is dated 2/22/1995.

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