See Two Sides of Playwright Keiko Green at Seattle Theaters in September

Exotic Deadly and Hells Canyon are two very different plays. Do they share any similarities?

Yeah, these shows are so wildly different in genre. I’m really excited to show two different parts of my brain to people. Exotic Deadly is a coming-of-age, time-traveling, wacky comedy that changes locations sometimes three times in a page, [while] Hells Canyon sits in one location for the entire play, so even structurally, they’re really different. I do think there is definitely a perspective in both that comes from the Asian American female leads. In Exotic Deadly, we see someone who is really dealing with some internalized self-loathing of her identity. And then in Hells Canyon, it’s a lot more about the inherited trauma that turns scary. But both shows are also really, really funny. With Exotic Deadly, that should be unsurprising, but I think people will be really surprised by how funny Hells Canyon is.

Comedy seems to be a through line in your work, even when you’re dealing with some really thorny themes. What draws you to humor?

I’m a big supporter of the fact that we earn our dramatic moments rather than earning our comedic moments, and comedy is a great way to get people on board. My number-one goal is to entertain, and if I can get someone to start laughing, it makes it a lot easier to deal with a heavy theme. One thing with horror is that you need a release. It’s one of the reasons why there are so many comedians who are making great horror films right now, like Jordan Peele and the director of Weapons [Zach Cregger]. You can get people to release from a moment of tension by giving them something to scream about or giving them something to laugh about. And both things are, timing-wise and musically, kind of the same. They work in similar ways, which is surprising, but it’s been really interesting to learn.

Hells Canyon is your first horror play. What motivated you to write something in that genre?

I love horror. There’s not a lot of good horror plays, and I really wanted to see if I could write something that worked [onstage]. Instead of trying to make a horror play that felt like a movie, I thought, what is it inherently about theater that lends itself to making an even better horror experience? In film and TV, we are constantly moving action forward, almost at breakneck speed, and in theater, we get to sit in that tension a little bit longer. Things happen, and then we live in the consequences and see how people are reacting and handling things poorly. I think that if we’re not shying away from discomfort, theater should actually be doing horror even better, because those things are so inherent in the art form! So I wanted to test out some of those theories.

What horror media did you have in mind while writing Hells Canyon?

Definitely Get Out—not just the fact that there’s a racial element to it, but also the comedy of it. Hereditary and The Babadook—there’s something interesting about a mother who is losing it. I love watching someone turn into a monster they don’t want to be. I’m curious about whether, in this show, people are going to be rooting for Ariel or scared of her. And Rosemary’s Baby, there’s definitely some pregnancy-related body horror in there, too.

Hells Canyon draws from the real-life history of the Snake River Massacre in Hells Canyon, Oregon, in which 34 Chinese gold miners were attacked and murdered by seven white horse thieves. What inspired you to write a play about that incident?

I traveled through [Hells Canyon], and it was so beautiful, and there were kids playing in the river. There was something about that that made me realize we have no idea about what happened on the land that we have a great time on. We don’t really think about what came before us. That felt really strange to me. And also, this was a piece of history I had never heard of before, and most people have never heard of before. The massacre happened in the late 1800s, and they just put up the first real memorial a few years ago. Even still, they know all the names of the murderers, but they don’t even know all the names of the people who were killed. There’s an injustice there that I couldn’t quite shake from my brain. It made me think: What does it feel like to go into these spaces where culturally, you’re tethered to it in some way? What effect does that have, as a Chinese American person, to go to this space and hear about this history, and then everyone’s like, “Let’s get wasted”?

Like Ami, the protagonist of Exotic Deadly, you learned as a teen that your grandfather worked as a food scientist at the Japanese corporation Ajinomoto, which invented MSG. What were your initial feelings about that at the time?

I think at first it felt like, of course. One more thing that I hate about myself, you know what I mean? I grew up in Georgia, in a super white area. I went to Japanese school until fifth grade, and then I transferred to this American school down the street. All I wanted was for my mom to give me a turkey sandwich, and instead, she would make me these delicious, smelly bentos that were so nutritious. I would’ve murdered to just be able to buy chicken fingers, because I thought that was the coolest thing in the world. It was already in our brains that MSG was bad for you, so it was that deep, internalized kind of shame that makes you want to disappear. That’s really the heart of the play.

How have your views changed since then?

My brothers didn’t go [to Japanese school]; they went to American school the whole time, and I was so jealous of them that they just got to go to a regular school down the street. Now it’s like, what a gift my mom gave me. I have such a closeness to Japanese culture that my brothers don’t get to have, just based on language. They couldn’t have the same kinds of conversations with our grandmother that I could have. So it gave me access to a whole new world, and it was definitely a huge gift. 

Exotic Deadly is set in the year 1999. What are some of your favorite pop-culture references from that time period?

Wayne’s World, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. There’s a lot of fourth-wall-breaking [in Exotic Deadly], like in Saved by the Bell. A lot of times, I give the leads of the show a little bit of guidance by mentioning Lizzie McGuire. She’s All That is a perfect 1999 motion picture—I’m sure there’s a lot of influence from that without me even realizing. And then there’s the Japanese side of it. It’ll be fun to see how the fights work in this production—we’ve done some Sailor Moon homages and some Dragon Ball homages in the past.

What do you hope audiences will take away from these performances?

I hope people watch both and they’re reminded they’re allowed to show as many different flavors of themselves as they’ll see from me on these two very, very different plays. I think from Exotic Deadly, I want people to laugh really hard, and I want them to feel like we need to do a little more investigating about the information we’re given. We’re living in such a time of misinformation right now, and unfortunately, even though it’s set in 1999, the play feels more relevant than ever, because of the way things get thrown around and misconstrued and spread. For both plays, I hope people walk away considering what the lasting effects of these microaggressions can be on the communities around you. For Hells Canyon, I really hope people can think about [who they are] when they’re letting their rage consume them.

Can you tell me about your dog Gus?

He’s perfect. He’s a basset hound. He howls when he’s left alone. When he was a puppy, he tripped over his ears. We got him when he was nine weeks old. We actually got him in February 2020, one month before the pandemic hit. We had moved down to San Diego. My husband had always wanted a basset hound, and we ended up picking him up. He was the runt of the litter, and now he runs our entire life.