Far Off Broadway
Far Off Broadway (FOB) was a student-run Asian American performance group which operated from 1998 to 2007. The first of its kind at Dartmouth, FOB was founded by Andrew Chu ‘01 and Gerald Lam ‘01 in their freshman year, under three organizing principles:
1. To provide a dramatic outlet for Asian American students on campus, both those with experience and those without
2. To showcase an often ignored aspect of Asian American culture, in hpopes of educating and entertaining AA and non-AA audiences
3. To present dramatic works of AA relevance, in hopes of sparking an interest in AA culture and history as a whole.
Whilst Andrew and Gerald were on campus, FOB organized at least one Asian American centered performance each term, inspired by the concurrent rise of LA and NYC’s Asian American theater scene. Deriving their name from their first performance, David Henry Huang’s Fresh Off Broadway, which was itself a play on the common racist epithet, “Fresh Off the Boat,” Far Off Broadway riffed off of the simultaenous actions of Dartmouth’s vested institutitional racism as well as physical isolation from the East and West coasts’ diverse urban and creative centers that literally and figuratively placed the Asian American student body “Far Off Broadway.”
During their active years, Far Off Broadway were the most prolific Asian American performance group in the history of Dartmouth. Integrated closely with Asian American student life from the late 90’s to early 2000’s, FOB’s performances served as a hub and symbol for a lively Asian American artistic community at Dartmouth.
Achievers
Far Off Broadway’s performances ranged from classics in Asian American theater, contemporary pieces, and members’ own written works. Co-founders Andrew Chu and Gerald Lam’s final contribution Achievers was a contemporary piece, performed for the first time ever in 2001S at Dartmouth. Cosponsored by the Drama department, the play saw considerable success, selling out tickets at the Hopkins Center of Arts on the second night of its performance. As the first production of the play before it reached professional theater, FOB’s Achievers even attracted the attention of the playwright, Michael Golamco, who visited campus to see the performance.
Achievers was a comedy centered around the experiences of five Asian American roomates, each from heterogenous ethnic backgrounds and occupying different stereotypes with intertwining narratives. Set in a meta-sitcom set, where the audience could see boom mics and recording equipment as if the actors were involved in the filming of a TV show, the play broke the fourth wall to comment on dominant representations of Asian Americans in media, directly challenging the Model Minority Myth with a crime-riddled story involving high-achieving Asian American college students. Celebrating pan-ethnicity and challenging the Asian American monolith, the performance went on to win the Frost & Dodd Award, the highest honor of Dartmouth’s annual play festival.
Intersections
In the years after Andrew and Gerald left, Far Off Broadway’s legacy was continued by Morna Ha ‘04, who had featured in Achievers in her freshman year and was heavily involved in Asian American student activism on campus. While not as consistently putting on performances as the original casts and members of F.O.B left over the years, Morna focused on highlighting intersectional and political Asian American issues via performance.
One subgroup within FOB, Raunchy Asian Women (RAW), featured an all-women cast, consistently centering performances based around various Asian American women’s experiences in One Wheelock. Contesting stereotypes around Asian American femininity and demurity, RAW was a site of empowerment for the community, inviting audiences of not only Asian American femmes, but also friends, peers, and students who sought to understand Asian American women’s issues.
Unsettling dominant narratives of Asian American agency, Raunchy Asian Women was integrated into Counter Culture Night, another subgroup of FOB. Located in Collis Common Ground and featuring a spoken word duo, Counter Culture Night was perfomed in response to the DAO’s Culture Nights, seeking to avoid cultural fetishization and explore the darker, more troubled aspects of the Asian American experience.