“It’s safe here. I can shoot things. You’re totally safe. I can hit stuff,” twelve-year old Edith casually remarks to Benji, her sixteen-year old brother’s boyfriend. She’s sitting comfortably on an old couch placed center stage, fiddling with a messy Rubik’s cube, while Benji is standing to stage right, nervously holding a book bag to his chest, his eyes peering through unfashionable aviator glasses. The actors aren’t actually twelve and sixteen – all three characters in A. Rey Pamatmat’s “Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them” are performed by adults as intended – but on stage they embody the sensitive, tumultuous years of three kids trying to make their own kind of family. I chuckle at Benji’s awkward attempts at making conversation with Kenny’s precocious young sister when Kenny himself enters the room. As he shares a tender look with Benji, I feel a pang in my chest. There he is. The one queer Asian that I discovered in high school, the one that helped me realize that I wasn’t alone, that I might be just as normal as the next person. I had waited for so long to see what happened to him at the end of the play when I was younger, hoping that his story might reflect happiness in my future. And now, as I see Edith toss the Rubik’s cube in Kenny’s face and demand a solution, I realize that I finally have that chance.

I found out about “Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them” back in the fall of my senior year of high school. One of my favorite actresses from the “Lizzie Bennet Diaries”, a modern adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”, was tweeting about different plays happening in LA, and the curious theatre bug inside of me decided to check out one of her video links.

(Cho, 2012)

She had edited together a series of interviews with the directors and the actors talking about the show and spliced them with clips of rehearsals – a promo video for an Artists at Play’s performance in LA. When the title slowly appeared on the black screen, I did a double take. “Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them”? What kind of show name was that? It was such a mouthful to say out loud that I started to Google search the play. As the director’s calm voice described her appreciation and love for the play in my earbuds, I scanned news articles for the playwright and the performance. New voices popped up as the actors discussed the characters in the play, the theme of family, and the importance of Asian American representation in theatre.

As I shifted from my news search to the video, I noticed that Kenny and Benji seemed awfully close. Closer than the “friends” they were labeled at the beginning of the video. A brief shot of Kenny tenderly removing Benji’s glasses in the middle of a rehearsal started my suspicions that there might be something more than shared family difficulties between the two of them. And then a full scene of Kenny and Benji going through words in a dictionary, with the director’s voice-over explaining that they were looking for terms to explain and justify their homosexuality, finally struck a chord in my heart. They were trying to figure out what homosexuality was in the middle of Midwest America, all by themselves, with only a few comic books to show them that their love was normal and natural.

I looked at Kenny’s open and pondering face and quietly exclaimed in my mind, you exist! Queer Asians are a real thing. There are actual walking, breathing queer people of Asian descent, and there are enough experiences of them existing for someone to write a play about one. I felt a little warm blanket of relief fall over my mind. So you can exist too. Kenny exists on the stage, so you can exist in real life. Maybe being queer isn’t something a “white person uses to get attention,” despite what other people have told you. Maybe being queer isn’t a part of your imagination.

From then on I endeavored to find out what happened in the play. Even if the play got popular enough to reach Seattle, I lived in a little suburb of Federal Way, Washington without driver’s insurance or a car; the chance that I would be able to drive forty minutes to the theatre district in Seattle was pretty much nil. Asking my parents to drive me was also out of the question. Both my mother and father were pretty conservative and they would never let me watch a play that had a gay romance up front and center stage. The group of friends that I had in high school were also less able to get me to “Edith.” My parents barely allowed my friends to drive me anywhere, and I was also too nervous to talk about my potential queer thoughts outside of my own mind. I had several friends in my wind ensemble that were out of the closet at that point, but I was still afraid to share with them my own insecurities about my sexuality. What if I wasn’t as queer as I thought I was? They had been so confident in knowing who they were when they came out to the band – who was I to tentatively tip-toe out of the closet?

So I tried to watch the play vicariously by scavenging YouTube for “Edith” production videos and scouring news articles and event summaries to piece together some sort of plot. I wanted to find out what happened to the little self-made family of three, and what that might mean for the future of queer Asian me.

After reading many variations of the synopsis over and over again, I eventually worked out a general summary of the play. The Chicago Stage Standard in particular had a wonderful overview (Bykowski, 2015). I read that Edith and Kenny were two Filipino-American siblings living alone in 1990s Midwest America, their mother long dead and their father constantly working away in the city. Kenny tries to be the adult of the family – he works to keep Edith out of trouble, but is too afraid to stand up to his neglectful father. Edith believes herself to be the defender of the family, wielding a BB rifle along with a bow and arrows around the house, but is still a little girl that chats with her toy frog Fergie and takes her actions to the extremes. Benji is Kenny’s nerdy classmate, a brilliant future MIT or RISD student, but also a son struggling to gain independence and come out to his conservative, overprotective mother. Camille Lamb, reviewer for the Miami New Times, described the three characters as forming their own family, a family that would offer them a safe space from the unsympathetic world around them. I couldn’t agree more.

Each one of the three called out to me. Benji called to the part of me that also had strict parents who barely let my friends drive me around with their new licenses, and the part that had ambitions to go to a tech school and study some kind of engineering. Like Edith, I loved shooting targets with a bow and arrows. Her brave, adventurous, “shoot first” attitude reminded me of my “spitfire” sister when she was Edith’s age. That is probably what led me to connect with Kenny the most. I understood what it was like to be the older sibling of a super-active younger sister, to be the one to call my sister down from tall heights, to be the one to remind her to do her homework, to be the one to fight out calculus with a close friend, and also to be the one afraid to confront my parents about almost anything. And to be the one that wasn’t sure of what to make of my sexuality. I guess I was hoping that the play would give me a hint of what the future would look like to the Asian kid that found that she wasn’t straight.

I managed to find a portion of the play script from an online sample of scripts from the 2011 Humana Festival, the event at which the play debuted[1]. I read through the dialogue and stage descriptions and laughed at Edith’s antics and sighed at Kenny’s and Benji’s burgeoning romance. I had just reached the place where Edith shoots and hits someone in defense of her new family and anxiously looked down to see what happens next – and saw a blank page. The sample had ended. I bit my lower lip and felt my stomach ball up in disappointment. I guess I wouldn’t find out what happened to Edith. Or what happened to Kenny, worrying over Edith ending up in custody. Or Benji, now living with the siblings after coming out to his mother. My personal search with the play would have to wait. I hovered my mouse over the “X” in the upper right corner of the browser window and the script folded away.

I didn’t think about the play for a while. Short of pirating the script from a sketchy, virus-infested website or actually purchasing the 2011 Humana Festival Collection, I had exhausted all my internet options to acquire the end of “Edith.” But I had just started my search for plays and novels and articles with LBGTQA+ themes. I picked up “Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe” and dived into the tale of two young adults trying to figure out their sexuality and identity as they grew up and become friends. I looked at Wikipedia articles for “bisexuality” and “questioning,” and looked at videos from college gay-straight alliances (GSAs). I entered my freshman year at MIT identifying as queer/questioning and fully came out as bisexual by freshman spring after talking with all of my LGBTQA+ friends on campus. By my freshman summer, I was pretty comfortable with my sexuality among my peers.

By then “Edith” had faded from memory, but it returned a year later. I was deleting my Google Promotions tab and caught the show’s title in a Huntington Theatre newsletter. Company One was performing “Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them” at the Calderwood Pavilion in Boston. It even had a “pay-what-you-can performance” on my birthday, June 7^th. I did a double take and immediately made plans to go the matinee with a theatre friend. The details of the show had faded from my mind, but I remembered how badly I had wanted to see the end. Here was my chance to finally see the future that my high school self had hoped for and craved.

The day of the performance, a giant rainbow flag prepped for the Boston Pride Parade was hanging on a building across from the theatre. My friend and I walked into the theatre space, took our seats, and gazed at the simple wooden beams and couch set. A member of Company One made the pre-show announcement and walked off, and the play started.

 

Edith stands watch over the house at night (Fox, 2015).

 

Benji and Kenny talk about school on the way to Benji’s house (Fox, 2015).

 

I don’t want to spoil the play for everyone, but I will say that it was the charming, melancholy, funny, poignant, and exactly what my questioning high school senior self would have loved. The actors were amazing and the production was excellent. The ending was hopeful – all three young adults grew from their trials, formed a new family, and grew more confident in who they were.

Watching the play from the “other end” of my questioning period, I no longer felt the reassurance that my seventeen-year old self would have wanted. I didn’t really need “Edith” for that anymore. But I did feel a kind of happy confidence. As the actors took their bows and the audience gave their applause, I could feel the characters’ joy mirroring my own joy and hope for the future.

References

Artists at Play. “EDITH CAN SHOOT THINGS AND HIT THEM.” Artists at Play: a theatre collective. 2012. Web. 5 Apr. 2016.

Artists at Play. “EDITH CAN SHOOT THINGS AND HIT THEM (Los Angeles Premiere).” Online video clip. YouTube. 8 Oct 2012. Web. 4 Apr. 2016.

Bykowski, Sandra. “‘Edith and Shoot Things and Hit Them’ Hits Its Mark @FirstFloor Theater.” Chicago Stage Standard.” 12 Jan 2015. Web. 5 Apr. 2016.

Cho, Julia (thatjuliacho). “working tirelessly with @AAPlay as we prep for dress rehearsals, previews, and then OPENING NIGHT THIS WEEK! youtu.be/rAL-8HUCAYs #AAPEdith.” 15 Oct. 2012. Tweet.

Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them. By A. Rey Pamatmat. Shawn LaCount. Company One Theatre. Boston, MA. 7 June 2015. Performance.

Fox, Paul. “Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them.” Company One Theatre. Gallery. Image. Web. 5 Apr. 2016.

Lamb, Camille. “New Theatre’s Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them Is Worth a Shot.” Miami New Times. N.p., 16 Oct. 2011. Web. 5 Apr. 2016.

 

[1] The excerpt of the 2011 Humana Festival plays that I found back in high school was a preview from Google Books if memory serves me right. Unfortunately, Google Books no longer has a digital preview.