"The Far Country" Comes To Co-Op

David Shih, Joyce Meimei Zheng, Destyne Miller and Amy Boratko. Lucy Gellman Photos.

Caden Davila-Sanabria can count the steps leading to Co-Op’s stage. There are six, laid in low cement and covered with maroon carpeting. She can picture stepping from one onto the next, a journey she’s made dozens of times as a theater student and junior at the school. 

But if she were pressed to describe them as proof of her student status—proof that she belonged at Co-Op—she’s not sure she’d be able to remember them in precise detail. Especially if she felt like someone was trying to find a lie between her words.

That anecdote came to Co-Op Thursday morning, as creative team members of Lloyd Suh’s The Far Country joined a second-period directing class to talk about the show. Speaking with students for over an hour, they introduced the play and mined it for meaning, connecting it to the present as they unpacked decades of history and anti-Chinese discrimination and bias.

The play runs now through May 18 at the Yale Repertory Theatre (Co-Op students plan to see it next week, as part of the Rep’s Will Power! program). Tickets and more information are available here.

Speakers included actors David Shih and Joyce Meimei Zheng, as well as assistant director Destyne Miller and artistic producer Amy Boratko. As it jumped from immigration to language barriers to untaught American history, the discussion underscored the need for more playwrights and directors of color in the field—and for a more sweeping view of history in public schools in New Haven and across the country.     

“All you have to do is open a window to what was happening on the other side of the country 100 years ago, and you see that these cycles repeat,” said Boratko, senior artistic producer at the Yale Repertory Theatre. “And they repeat for a reason. If we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about them and learning about them, that’s how it’s easier for systems to persist.”

Written by Lloyd Suh and directed by Ralph B. Peña, The Far Country tells the story of Han Sang Gee (David Shih), a Chinese immigrant and businessman who, when the play opens, is trying to prove that he was born in the U.S. as a means of self-preservation. As an officer from the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization Services grills him, he responds through a translator, hopping between broken English and Taishanese (a dialect of Cantonese, which Suh indicates using fluid English) to create a sense of language and its limits.

If this seems like it’s going to be another immigrant-up-by-the-bootstraps story, an audience member doesn’t know Suh’s work, or the gift he has for deep history. In an era of impossible economic choices—the early 20th century marked extreme flooding and famine in China—Gee recruits a Chinese boy (Hao Feng as Moon Gyet) as his “paper son,” a term for Chinese immigrants who sacrificed their identities and their family ties for a chance to live and work in the United States. 

What follows is a history, told across three generations, of the horrors and cruelties of Angel Island (the West Coast’s point of entry into the U.S.), of immigration’s economic, spiritual, and emotional toll, and the high price Chinese immigrants had to pay for mere survival in America, a country built by stolen people on stolen land.

In stretching time—New Haven audiences may remember that device from The Chinese Lady at Long Wharf Theatre—Suh folds in both Chinese and American history, showing a real time progression of anti-Chinese bias in the U.S.

Thursday, students and cast members connected that history to the present, from family separation at the U.S.-Mexico border to the number of undocumented immigrants living and working in New Haven. As they did, they blurred characters’ experiences and their own, bringing Suh’s themes to life in the quiet of a high school black box theater. 

“What’s In A Name?”

Dream Keitazulu, who is headed to UNH in the fall.

That blurring began early in the conversation, delivered between overhead announcements on AP testing, after school clubs and the prom. Miller, an MFA candidate at the David Geffen School of Drama, stressed just how much is lost when a person is forced to assimilate. For many immigrants, particularly those who made the journey as “paper sons,” that includes giving up the name with which they were born.

“I just want to throw this question out to you guys, if you don’t mind—what is in a name? What’s important about your name?” she started.

“Your identity?” ventured senior Dream Keitazulu, piping up from the second row. Miller nodded. “What else?”

“Your dignity,” Keitazulu said, this time more certain. Miller moved closer to the edge of her seat, scanning students’ faces. She extended one arm, in the universal symbol for go on. “What else?” A beat. “These are great answers.”

“Who you’re tied to,” Davila-Sanabria said.

“Who you’re tied to!” Miller responded. “Which means that in your name contains … what?”

“Your family,”  Davila-Sanabria responded. “Your legacy.”

“Your family, your history, where you’re coming from,” Miller said. “Where you’re going. The dignity attached to your family’s legacy, right? We’re talking about a person, when we talk about paper sons, having to give up their name, having to give up their history, having to give up their legacy in order to take on someone else’s new name and learn a new history.”

“Yeah!” Keitazulu jumped back in. “And it’s like, your name is so specific to you, it’s like you’re losing everything. Where you came from, what you do—you’re like a new person.”

“That’s right,” said teacher Rob Esposito, so quietly he might have been talking to himself. Miller jumped back in.    

“We can talk about the economic hardships, ‘cause those are equally important, but giving up a name, I think, is something that takes its toll in a completely different way that is hard to see,” Miller said. “That’s a chip off the soul that we can’t see visually and we can’t touch.”

“Compounded by the fact that they would probably never return,” Esposito added. “And it wasn’t like you could facetime. There was no communication. You would leave everything you know.”

"You Can’t Understand My Language!”

The back-and-forth echoed through the black box, a constant reminder of the uncertainty and loss that can hang in the balance when a person leaves their home and their family. But that was only the beginning, Miller said. When they reached Angel Island, Chinese immigrants often faced harsh, coercive and long interrogations that sought to delegitimize their right to citizenship. 

She called students’ attention to two scenes mediated by translators, in which actors have to “keep their drive” as a third party enters the conversation and asks a series of rapid fire questions. In the first, a fellow Chinese person translates for Gee. In the second, it is a white man who translates. She asked Zheng to model what that felt like with a go-between.

“Who wants to do it? Anybody?” she asked when Zheng suggested that a student join them.   

“I can do it!” Davila-Sanabria volunteered from one side of the room. Within moments, she and Miller were sitting face-to-face, Zheng sandwiched in between them for translation.   

The questions came one after the other. What was her name? Did she have siblings? Was her brother older or younger? What year was she in school? When she jumped in to answer before Zheng, Miller held up her hand in objection.

“Nope,” she said. “You can’t hear me. You can’t understand my language!”

“Right!” she said.

“Right!” Zheng echoed.

Joyce Meimei Zheng and Caden Davila-Sanabria. 

Miller sailed through another round of questions. What did Davila-Sanabria want to do when she was older? What got her into theater in the first place? What changed her about watching West Side Story as a movie? What did she want to do with writing and directing?

“Come on!” Miller said, snapping twice when Davila-Sanabria paused.

“I want to inspire girls like me to be …” Davila-Sanabria paused. “ … to be very insane and …”

“Wait! Yes!” Zheng said. “I want to inspire girls like me to be very insane and—”

“Passionate about what they do!” Davila-Sanabria finished. As the class erupted into applause, Keitazulu piped up from the second row. If she’d been in Zheng’s shoes, she said, she would have struggled with both remembering what to translate and who to address.

“Like, I would feel so, like, shut down,” Keitazulu said. Miller picked up the conversation immediately.

“Now so, imagine this where—I’m asking her about art, stuff she’s passionate about,” Miller said. “But what if this conversation wasn’t nice? What if this conversation was, we tried to find the lie? What if this conversation was trying to push her out of her comfort zone so that the lie appears?”

Miller stressed how hard it is to have an interpreter in the room, gathering information before delivering it to either party. As a director, she has pushed actors to communicate with body language as much as they do with words. She encouraged the students to use all of the resources at their disposal, thinking about language more extensively than words alone. 

“Why Art Matters”

As they discussed The Far Country, several students also noted how little they have learned about Asian and Asian American history in their classes. In four years, the only Asian history Keitazulu has learned is the timeline of the atomic bomb, and its horrific aftermath on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. She had no idea that the Chinese Exclusion Act existed—much less a sense of Asian narratives across a vast diaspora. 

Meanwhile, she’s learned about George Washington and the founding fathers half a dozen times. Although there is new legislation requiring Connecticut schools to integrate AAPI history into their curricula, it does not start until fall 2025.

“What makes you not want to teach us this, but you guys can teach us about, like, George Washington,” she said to laughs. “Some things, I have to learn on my own.”

Boratko picked up that narrative thread, noting how The Far Country doesn’t seem so far removed from the present. In the early 1900s, white Americans warned that Chinese immigrants were coming to the country to take their jobs. They said that Chinese people spread disease. They accused Chinese women of sex work, promiscuity, and stealing white men.

To her and to cast members, it sounded chillingly similar to the treatment of Black and Brown people at the country’s Southern border. Shih remembered coming across a series of propaganda posters from the first decades of the twentieth century, when his character is building a life in the U.S. They warned that Chinese women were all lewd and that workers couldn’t be trusted.

“It sounded very familiar with a lot of things that are spoken about now,” he said.

Zheng, who graduated from Rutgers University just over a year ago, chimed in that she can identify with that feeling. In both high school and college, she learned almost no AAPI history. Her teachers referenced the Chinese Exclusion Act, she remembered—but that was it. In the year and a half after graduating, she’s learned decades of Chinese history through Suh’s work, in which she plays a mother of four named Yuen.

Miller pointed to the paradox that exists within American education: people aren’t taught the full breadth of the country’s history, and meanwhile immigrants are asked dozens of detailed questions about it on a test to become citizens. “I wonder how many of us would actually pass the test that immigrants have to take to prove that they are—” Miller started.

“Oh, I’d fail the test!” Keitazulu cut in.

“Like, I am failing it with flying colors,” Miller laughed. “They would be like, ‘Girl, did you even go to school?’ It’s amazing that there are people that are probably in our own government that could not pass that test, but are trying to make other people prove that they belong here by passing a test with, clearly, stuff on it that they don’t teach us.”

Both she and Shih encouraged students to take those histories, and fold them into their work as young directors. When students choose a work, Shih said, “you have your own take and your own interpretation, how you do it.” That’s where students have a kind of power, he said. “You can bring your own interpretation, which helps tell your version of the story.”

As they packed up, both Keitazulu and Davila-Sanabria said that they were both excited to see the show. For Keitazulu, who is bound for University of New Haven in the fall, it’s the kind of story she wants to see more of.

“What were the tragedies that made America what it is?” she said.