Rick Shiomi

Playwright

Rick Shiomi began his theater career in San Francisco, California at the Asian American Theater Company where his first play Yellow Fever was produced in 1982, for which he received the 1982 Bay Area Theater Circle Critics Award and a “Bernie” for new play from the San Francisco Chronicle. He later moved to New York City where the play was produced by the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre and then had a successful off-Broadway run. The Pan Asian Repertory Theatre produced several of his plays, including a prequel to Yellow Fever titled Rosie's Cafe and a sequel, Once is Never Enough, co-authored with Marc Hayashi and Lane Kiyomi Nishikawa.

Yellow Fever remains a classic in the canon of the Asian American/Canadian theatre movement. His other important early works include Rosie's Cafe, Play Ball, and Uncle Tadao.

Play Ball was produced at Pan Asian Repertory and Uncle Tadao was produced at both East West Players in Los Angeles and the Asian American Theater Company. Rosie's Cafe has been toured across Canada and the United States. Both Rosie’s Cafe and Yellow Fever have been produced in Japanese (translations by Toyoshi Yoshihara) in Tokyo, Japan.

From 1993 to 2013 Shiomi wrote a number of plays for Mu Performing Arts while he was Artistic Director there. The first of these was Mask Dance, based upon the stories of young Korean adoptees who were early participants in the company. Mask Dance incorporated a traditional performance form, Korean mask dance, into a contemporary Asian American story. Other plays written in this style were Song of the Pipa and The Tale of the Dancing Crane. Shiomi works almost entirely behind the scenes, or behind a taiko drum, but with the play The Tale of the Dancing Crane, he took center stage as an actor. He shared a traditional Japanese story of losing one precious thing to find something better and combined it with his own story of discovering taiko. Shiomi co-wrote the play The Walleye Kid with Sundraya Kase, which he adapted from a traditional Japanese fable titled Peach Boy, and the play was produced in 1999. The original story tells of a Japanese child who is found inside a peach and adopted by the old couple that discovered him. In The Walleye Kid, Shiomi has moved the setting from the warmer climate of Japan to the icy winters of Minnesota where the baby emerges from a giant Walleye. In this play, he explores what Asian, specifically Korean, adoptees have experienced as they adapt to life in America. Walleye Kid, The Musical, which Shiomi adapted from the play, was most recently produced in 2008 by Mu Performing Arts at the McKnight Theatre of the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts. In 2002, he co-authored Hmong Tiger Tales with Cha Yang, which was co-produced at the Weyerhaueser Auditorium by Mu Performing Arts and St. Paul's Steppingstone Theatre For Youth.

Mu Performing Arts

While in Minnesota as a visiting lecturer, Shiomi found an emerging Asian American community and a well-developed general theater scene. He also met his future wife Martha Johnson who, along with others, helped him co-found Theater Mu.^[2] He served as the Artistic Director there for twenty years. During that time he developed the company from an annual budget of $20,000 to over $500,000 and was involved in the development of many emerging Asian American theater artists. He selected and produced the early plays of such prominent national playwrights as Lauren Yee, Julia Cho and Michael Golamco and local writers as Katie Ka Vang, Sun Mee Chomet, Katie Hae Leo and May Lee Yang. He also oversaw the development of many actors such as Eric Sharp,  Sherwin Resurreccion, Katie Bradley, Sara Ochas and Kurt Kwan who now work regularly at theaters in the Twin Cities.

In 1997 Shiomi founded Mu Daiko, and was the artistic director, lead instructor, composer and player through 2010. The taiko group was so successful that in early 2000s the name Theater Mu was changed to Mu Performing Arts to recognize the fact of the two performing groups within the one company. Shiomi retired from active taiko performing in 2010, and the leadership of Mu Daiko was taken over by Iris Shiraishi, one of Shiomi's first students, and then in 2015 by Jennifer Weir. In 2017 the two groups, Theater Mu and Mu Daiko, officially separated, and Mu Daiko became a new entity, Midwest Taiko Arts under the leadership of Jennifer Weir.

Stage director

Shiomi began to develop his unique directorial approach during his first decade as artistic director of Mu Performing Arts when he directed several new, experimental works derived from deep personal narratives of the Asian American experience that were combined with traditional dance, music, or theater methods from related root Asian cultures. He used this unique directing approach with such original works as Mask Dance (1993), combining personal stories of Korean adoptees in America with traditional Korean mask dance; or in Song of the Pipa (2000), combining master Chinese pipa player Gao Hong’s wrenching immigrant story with her magnificent live performance as a musician.

This work as stage director at Mu moved forward when Shiomi expanded this approach with his re-imagining of classic western works from an Asian American perspective. This began in 2006 with his acclaimed re-envisioning of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream set in 19th Century Japan and featuring a mostly Asian American cast. For the production all characters in the fairy world performed in Korean mask dance style, wearing traditional Korean costume.

Shiomi has continued with this innovative approach of re-envisioning western classics from an Asian American perspective. In 2012 he directed Sondheim’s musical Into The Woods setting it in Japanese, Korean, Hmong, and Filipino magical folk tale worlds. In 2013 he directed a revolutionary version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado (co-produced by Skylark Opera), setting it in Edwardian England instead of Japan, and casting Asian American actors (as English men/women) in most of the lead roles, turning the racist depiction of Japanese on its head and receiving national coverage. In 2014 he directed Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, using color conscious casting to reframe the musical with an Asian American cast. And he has directed two David Henry Hwang plays, Yellow Face and Hwang’s revision of Flower Drum Song by Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Since leaving Mu Performing Arts in 2014, Shiomi has continued his important work as a director:  In 2014 he directed the world premiere of Caught by Christopher Chen, at InterAct Theatre, Philadelphia, for which he received the Philadelphia Barrymore Award Nomination for Outstanding Direction.  In 2015/16, Shiomi directed Theater: A Sacred Passage for the new theater company he has co-founded, Full Circle Theater. This original/devised performance piece presents the powerful personal narratives of five racially diverse Full Circle theater artists and how they discovered their passion to pursue theater as a profession. In 2017 Shiomi directed: You For Me For You by Mia Chung, at InterAct Theatre, Philadelphia.  In 2017 he co-directed 365 Days/365 Plays by Suzan Lori Parks for Full Circle, which received year-end accolades from several media reviewers.

Shiomi has also directed at the Asian American Theater Company in San Francisco, InterAct Theatre in Philadelphia, The Bloomington Civic Theatre in Minnesota, St. Paul's SteppingStone Theatre for Youth, and Theatre Esprit Asia in Denver.

Taiko artist and Mu Daiko

Shiomi is also an award-winning taiko artist, who began playing in 1979 as a member of Katari Taiko in Vancouver, British Columbia. In the 1980s, he studied with Grandmaster Seiichi Tanaka of the San Francisco Taiko Dojo, performing with several groups, including Soh Daiko of New York (as a guest artist) and Wasabi Taiko in Toronto. In 1997, at the behest of actors at Mu Performing Arts, he began teaching taiko, forming Mu Daiko, a taiko drumming ensemble, that same year. Under his leadership, Mu Daiko evolved into a regular troupe, performing one mainstage production a season, and over the years developed an extensive outreach and educational program with over a hundred engagements annually. In 2005, Mu Daiko performed at the mainstage performance, Taiko Jam, at the National Taiko Conference in Los Angeles. As lead player and composer for Mu Daiko for more than ten years, Shiomi garnered numerous awards including a 1998 MN State Arts Board Cultural Collaborations Award for taiko, a drumming collaboration with Ragamala Music and Dance Theater; a 2002 Paddle and Drum Composition Award for "Chrysanthemum Dawn"; and a 2004 Paddle and Drum Composition Award for "Kiyomizu Cascade". In 2010, he retired from regular participation in the Mu Daiko, which is now led by Jennifer Weir.

Recently published work

As artistic director of Mu Performing Arts, Shiomi oversaw the development of new plays including Ching Chong Chinaman by Lauren Yee, Cowboy Versus Samurai by Michael Golamco, Happy Valley by Aurorae Khoo, Bahala Na by Clarence Coo, Asiamesia by Sun Mee Chomet, and WTF by Katie Ka Vang. He is a co-editor of Asian American Plays for a New Generation^[3] published by Temple University Press in June 2011. In this anthology of new plays by Asian American playwrights, Mu Performing Arts developed and produced the world premiere of six of the seven featured.

Plays

Multimedia credits

Story editor and staff writer for Canadian television series E.N.G., produced by Alliance on CTV

• Images of the First Hundred Years, Powell Street Revue, 1980 (documentary, 11 min.)
• Dance to Remember (as writer), CBC, Inside Stories, 1991 (30 min.)

Other

• Garrick Chu, Sean Gunn, Paul Yee, Ken Shikaze, Linda Uyehara Hoffman, Rick Shiomi, eds.; Inalienable Rice: A Chinese & Japanese Canadian Anthology Powell Street Revue & The Chinese Canadian Writers Workshop. 83 pp.
• Srikanth, Rajini and Esther Yae Iwanaga; Bold words: a century of Asian American writing, Rutgers University Press, 2001, ISBN 0-8135-2966-2
• Josephine Lee, Don Eitel and R.A. Shiomi, eds.; Asian American Plays for a New Generation, Temple University Press, 2011, ISBN 1-4399-0515-0