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LOS ANGELES » When theater artist Leilani Chan was touring with her play "Refugee Nation," about the Laotian-American community, she began collecting stories from taxi drivers.
"I was really interested in how the taxi-driver experience around the world was really similar to the refugee experience," she said. "They’re not the people who we expect them to be when we find out what their stories really are."
These true taxi tales — alternately humorous, harrowing, tender and tense — became the basis for her new play "Global Taxi Driver," which ends a one-week run Sunday at East West Players, a prestigious playhouse in downtown L.A.’s Little Tokyo district.
Chan, who wrote and directed "Taxi," was born in Honolulu and grew up in Kaimuki. She graduated from Kalani High School and performed in a 1980s Kumu Kahua Theatre production of Henry Kapono’s "Home in the Islands." Chan received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of California, Irvine, in 2004.
"Global Taxi Driver," which had its world premiere in September in Minneapolis, runs the transportation gamut, with tuktuks, cyclos, shuttles, company cars, medallion cabs and ride-hailing services all getting their due in a series of vignettes set in such locales as Bangkok, Havana, New York and the Middle East. Hawaii is the setting for two scenes.
As the "Hawaii Five-0" theme song plays, the first opens at Honolulu Airport, where Ova Saopeng (Chan’s husband) portrays Kimo, a local cabbie picking up two drunken Arizona students wearing garish aloha shirts. Visiting Oahu for spring break, they give Kimo plenty of trouble, arguing with him over which team is superior: the University of Arizona Wildcats or the local Rainbow Warriors. The exasperated driver threatens to ditch the unruly tourists in the middle of nowhere unless they shout, "Go Bows!" As the episode ends, the hack mutters, "Time for me to move to Hilo."
Kimo reappears later as a Big Island dispatcher. This time the "Five-0" theme is Kimo’s ring tone and is heard frequently as riders seek taxis. Among them is Auntie Vivian (Elyse Dinh), a kupuna clad in a red muumuu and wide-brimmed lau hala hat. The humorous scene revolves around drivers repeatedly getting lost, despite Kimo’s directions and Hilo’s relatively small size. "At least I’m not at Honolulu International Airport driving around," Kimo muses.
Other vignettes swerve toward tragedy, detailing the crimes confronting taxi drivers and their passengers. These include robbery, assault, rape and a shooting. Tensions between traditional taxis and the new app-driven ride-hailing services epitomized by Uber pit driver against driver, erupting in a rumble.
Set to John Williams’ stirring "Superman" theme song, the grand finale is an inspiring homage to hacks, portraying them as working-class heroes who face the perils of the road to provide for their families.
Although she now lives in L.A., Chan maintains her island roots. In the late 1990s she wrote and performed "E Nana i ke Kumu" ("Look to the Source"), a one-woman show about contemporary Hawaii issues such as tourism and gay marriage. This led to her iconoclastic performance-art piece "Life as a Dashboard Hula Dancer," which Chan presented at art galleries to shatter "inauthentic images of Hawaii’s women as apolitical hula dancers who are beautiful and passive."
"I deconstruct that stereotype," she said. "I lean more toward the tita side — but I’m an educated tita."
Saopeng, who was born in Laos, participated in T-Shirt Theatre, an Alliance for Drama Education program, while attending Farrington High School. He went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in theater at the University of Southern California.
The two met in L.A. They have been married 11 years and have a son.
Chan is founding artistic director and Saopeng associate producer of the L.A.-based nonprofit TeAda Productions, which gets its name from the pidgin pronunciation of "theater." The group co-presented the L.A. premiere of "Global Taxi Driver" with East West Players, America’s longest-running theater of color.
On the Net
» For more information, visit teada.org.
Former Makaha resident Ed Rampell co-authored "The Hawaii Movie and Television Book" (Mutual Publishing).
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TEADA PRODUCTIONS