Last week, Seattle Children’s Theatre announced their decision to pull their two-week run of the play Young Dragon: A Bruce Lee Story from the Kennedy Center due to the impact of the Trump administration—namely, Trump installing himself as chairman, dismissing and replacing staff, and installin g his name above Kennedy's. The Stranger caught up with playwright Keiko Green about the decision. by Julianne Bell Last week, Seattle Children’s Theatre announced their decision to pull their two-week run of the play Young Dragon: A Bruce Lee Story from the Kennedy Center due to the impact of the Trump administration—namely, Trump installing himself as chairman, dismissing and replacing staff, and installing his name above Kennedy's. Many other artists, including Issa Rae, Phillip Glass, and the cast of Hamilton, have also canceled their upcoming performances at the theater for political reasons. The play would have been staged at the Center in April, after its still-planned run at the Children’s Theatre from February 19 to March 15. "The landscape in which the production was originally created has changed to an extent that after careful consideration, we have come to the decision that this is not the right time to transfer a SCT production to the Kennedy Center,” said SCT managing director Kevin Malgesini in a statement. “Our priority is to honor Bruce Lee's story with integrity and to uphold the trust our community places in us.” Keiko Green, the playwright, has been a celebrated contributor to Seattle’s wider theatre landscape. She was commissioned to write the script for Young Dragon by SCT and the Kennedy Center two years ago.  And in the meantime, Seattle hosted productions of two of her plays: Exotic Deadly: Or the MSG Play, a wacky time-traveling comedy set in 1999, and Hells Canyon, a chilling horror thriller. Green has also written for TV shows like Hulu’s Interior Chinatown and the upcoming series Margo’s Got Money Troubles, which stars Elle Fanning and Nicole Kidman and premieres on Apple TV on April 15. The Stranger caught up with her after the announcement to pull the Young Dragon from the Kennedy Center. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. This decision means that the play isn't associated with the Trump administration, but it also limits its chance to reach a wider audience. How do you feel about that? It's really complicated, to be totally honest with you. I really feel a lot of relief about this decision, personally. I can't really speak for the theater. I mean, there's obviously a lot of stress and complexity along with it too. I know that we had school shows that were going to be pretty heavily attended. When it comes to the public shows, the audience space has declined to around 20 percent of what it used to be, so I know that there's already been such a lack of support from their previous audiences. I'm very sad about the school shows that will be canceled. In a way, the fact that the ticket sales for the Kennedy Center at large are down [makes me think] okay, at least we're not robbing a huge plethora of people. And the people who are upset about us not going probably weren't ever going to come to the show anyway. They're not really people who are supporting a story about a cool Asian American, and they're not necessarily supporting children's theater, either. I also think that this was really an opportunity for us to tell the country and the world morally where we stand with this play. As much as it's sad to not be able to reach this audience immediately, I actually think we can use this as a launching point to try to reach out to new partners and find a future. My hope is that it'll end up in DC at some point, whether it's with the Kennedy Center in the future or a different location. It's just not going to be at this very moment, at that very place. Are you and Seattle Children’s Theatre looking into any alternative venues? I have personally been in touch with a few other theaters that have just reached out to read the script in completely different locations outside of DC—I’ve [been in contact with] a theater in Southern California and a theater in Kansas City. I've heard that [Seattle Children’s Theatre] plans to hopefully bring people from other regions in to see the production itself. I am so proud of this team. What's really great about the play right now is that we have all this attention for pulling out, and with that comes a bit of pressure to make sure the show is good. I think the show is really, really cool, so the moment that we get people to come in and see what we're offering, I feel really confident that the show is going to have a future. How were you involved in the decision making process, and how long were you and Seattle Children’s Theatre thinking about this? We've been having these conversations for a long time. About a year ago, we had this workshop in New York, and at that time, there were a lot of conversations that were happening separately. Before the [Kennedy Center’s] name changed, when the board was first fired and replaced, there was a conversation with myself and the director, Jess McLeod, about what that meant. For me, growing up in the South and seeing so little representation, for a long time I was like, those kids need it maybe more than ever. It was always a decision where we were going to have to see how things were evolving and moving. For me, a big clincher is that no one who I was ever in communication with [at the Kennedy Center], who were giving notes through the process and were originally part of the commissioning team, works there anymore. We don't even know what to call this institution anymore, legally. There are still great people working there, and my heart goes out to them, but they're not the people who I originally was in contact with. So in addition to the big blowup and snowballing of everything that's been happening, there's just been a very real sense that I don't know what we're walking into. I really applaud Seattle Children's Theatre for this. There are very real consequences that are not just affecting them—there are actors who are losing two weeks of work and two weeks of health insurance. There are crew members in DC who were going to be rebuilding the set and bringing it in and working the show, who are now going to be out of a job. [SCT] was really trying to talk to as many people who would be affected as possible, and in between that, Jess McLeod and I were chatting with the leaders at SCT, probably every other day, to help them as they were making a decision. But ultimately, we were saying, it's their name on the line, it's their contracts, and so I'm here to support them. I'm not going to sabotage anybody, I'm not going to leave if the choice is to go, I'm not going to leave actors hanging. But we were pretty vocal that our hope was that we would be able to pull out of the contract. I know this play is at the Seattle Children’s Theatre, but would you encourage adults without children to attend too? We were originally hoping to write something that was mostly for teens, and we started opening up that age [group] a little bit. That means we're not dumbing it down or talking down to kids at all on this play, which serves the play and who Bruce was. It just means that instead of a lot of dialogue-heavy scenes, we might be leaning more into letting physicality and visual storytelling do some work. The play itself is really cool, even for diehard Bruce Lee fans—it's about a lesser-known part of his life, which is when he was in Seattle. Before, he had been basically banished from Hong Kong for getting into too much trouble and was feeling a lot of shame about where he was in his life and what that meant for his future. It was a huge, sobering wake-up call. Suddenly he's a dishwasher at a restaurant, and slowly, he's enrolling in college at University of Washington and becoming an instructor and getting the first little seeds of creating this new style of martial arts, Jeet Kune Do. What's really cool about the play is that even the parents or adults on their own who want to come see the show [will have] a really fun time. It'll be visually entertaining, but it's also a lot about his philosophies. The play is full of a lot of moments in Bruce Lee's life that are going to be a little less familiar, even to a lot of adults. I’m really excited. I think it's the most fully intergenerational thing I've ever written. My hope is always that number one, I don't want to talk down to kids because they're smarter than we think, and two, I just want to make sure that those parents who may already have a relationship to Bruce Lee can gain something from the story. What do you hope Seattle audiences take away from Young Dragon? The trickiest part of this play has been making a play that's about Bruce Lee, before he's the legend. I had a meeting with Shannon Lee, Bruce's daughter, and I asked her, “What do you hope that young people take away from the show?” She said, “I really want people to know how curious he was, how he was trying everything. How he was a real renaissance man.” He loved the arts, and he was also writing poetry and drawing and dancing—he was a cha cha champion!— in addition to being this movie star and the creator of Jeet Kune Do. Also, because the show so heavily features his philosophies, specifically the “be like water” philosophy, the play itself is about how Bruce Lee—who, as a kid, is this hothead, who we associate with in our play with fire—every single obstacle he's encountering, he’s hitting back as hard as he can, and there's this rageful fire. That's how he's approaching all of the obstacles in his life. Through the story, and in his time in Seattle, he's discovering truly what it means to be like water: When these obstacles present themselves, how do we find the cracks and the paths around to ultimately peacefully and more efficiently reach our goal? I think that the decision feels true to that message. We were hit with this big obstacle of having [to adapt from] the idea that we're going to be presenting the show at the Kennedy Center, and now we have this opportunity to find a new way around and hopefully find an even more exciting path forward for the play. ...read more read less