Editor’s Pick: The Logan Festival of Solo Performance
Logan Festival performers J. Elijah Cho and César Cadabes seize the moment with incisive, award-winning solo shows for everyone.
One of the region’s surefire picks for summertime stage delights, the Logan Festival of Solo Performance, presented by 1st Stage, returns for a fifth season, boasting two acclaimed solo works making their debut in the DMV.
Not My First Pandemic, written and performed by queer artist, activist, and educator César Cadabes, bridges his two experiences, decades apart, battling on the front lines through the AIDS crisis in San Francisco, then staring down COVID alongside his AAPI community in the darkest of recent times.
Mr. Yunioshi, written, directed, and performed by J. Elijah Cho, spins one of the most infamous examples of yellowface in cinema history — Mickey Rooney’s excruciating approximation of Holly Golightly’s Japanese landlord Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s — into a revealing and humorous exploration of identity and Asian representation in Hollywood.
Both performers employ humor to get to the heart of challenging conversations. Directed by queer comic Kat Evasco, Not My First Pandemic started as a work-in-progress, dubbed #Resist, that Cadabes was then commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission to expand into a full-length performance.
“#Resist was written during the Trump administration, when they started blatantly rolling back things like trans [people] serving in the military, wiping off LGBTQ folks from their White House website,” Cadabes says. “And it got me exhausted because there were so many things happening — boom, boom, boom, and everything.”
Having been heavily involved with early efforts during the HIV/AIDS epidemic to organize a response to the disease by and for those affected in the AAPI community, Cadabes recognized the Trump administration’s anti-LGBTQ policies as another signal to get organized.
“I had this whole experience of how we fought over these last decades,” he says, “and when that started happening with Trump — I mean, I’m not a young guy anymore, so it was very like, ‘I’m just tired.’ The whole thing about #Resist was like, I’m tired. Why do we have to keep doing this? And it just boiled down to that — the way we keep our sanity, the way we keep our love and our queer joy is to resist. That resistance is a very deep-rooted act of love.”
Cadabes joined that resistance with his art, and as an educator, working as Artistic Director of GAPA Theatre, mentoring queer AAPI storytellers. Also, he planned to build on his work-in-progress, based on the results of the 2020 election.
“And then COVID happened and it just kind of floored me,” he says. “I couldn’t create. Even though we were locked in and had nothing to do except write and everything. Maybe it was my fault for leaving CNN on every day, but it was just always ‘the numbers,’ and it was just overwhelming.”
Finally, after hiring a dramaturg to work with him on developing a response to the second pandemic, Cadabes recovered his flow, and Not My First Pandemic premiered in September 2022, as part of the With You Festival in San Francisco.
Cho’s Mr. Yunioshi also has played to acclaim and enthusiastic audiences on several prior stages, from an award-winning run at the Hollywood Fringe Festival to a recent run at the Sierra Madre Playhouse. Cho, best known for his role as Wonderboy on AMC’s ’80s-set tech drama Halt and Catch Fire, is soon set to reprise his Sierra Madre stand thanks to audience demand for his witty deconstruction of Rooney’s racial roleplay.
“I think I knew of the performance before I had seen it,” says Cho. “In fact, I didn’t watch the whole movie until — I want to say I was like in the middle of writing the first draft. And then was like, ‘Oh, you know, I should probably check out the whole thing.’ But I was familiar with the performance because people talk about it. When the topic of yellowface comes up, or representation, the name Mickey Rooney inevitably works its way into the conversation.”
Confessing that he actually doesn’t like to tweak people’s buttons, Cho says he sought to unload this messy conversation peacefully.
“I was curious, is there a way to talk about this that is humorous, and also conversation-starting, as opposed to strictly didactic, strictly, ‘This is bad, and we all know why!’ It’s kind of like starting from the point of, ‘What if someone didn’t know why it’s problematic?’ And so coming at it from that angle, I mean, as an actor, too, I don’t want to be playing a person that I actively despise for an hour. And so it’s kind of, ‘What are the bridges? How can I connect with Mickey Rooney?'”
Because inciting anger or offense about the role is not the goal, he says. Rather, he hopes to allow grace for anyone watching to reckon with, “Is this hurting people?”
“And I do think I’ve found a way to kind of — I don’t absolve Mickey Rooney of what he did, but I do think that there is a moment in there for audiences to be like, ‘Oh, man, if Mickey Rooney could just take the blinders off and assess his legacy, his relevancy, and what the results of what he did were, would it be entirely ego, or as a fellow human being, wouldn’t he be like, ‘I didn’t want them to not enjoy what I was doing.'”
Logan Festival of Solo Performance runs July 13 through 23 at 1st Stage, 1524 Spring Hill Road, in Tysons, Va. Individual tickets are $30 for each performance, with discounts available.
Not My First Pandemic runs July 13-23 and Mr. Yunioshi runs July 15-23. Call 703-854-1856 or visit www.1stStage.org.
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