American Theatre
September 2001

by Jean Schiffman

"I always know I'm on the right track with a play if, before I start it, I have an enormous amount of fear," confides San Francisco playwright Prince Gomolvilas.

Despite his regal-sounding name, Gomolvilas, 28, is clearly "of the people." Small and slight with rectangular, black-framed glasses and fashionably short hair, he's quiet, unassuming and jokily self-deprecating. For an interview at a local cafe following the opening of his latest work, Bee, he wears a gray V-necked sweater, jeans and black "pleather" jacket (the fabric of choice for "pinko commie veggies," he says), blending right in with the laptop-student crowd.

"All my characters are aspects of me and composites of people I interact with regularly," muses Gomolvilas. Bee, for example, commissioned by San Francisco's Lorraine Hansberry Theatre (the company's first non-African American commission), traces the bumpy relationship between Devon, a young Korean-American who discovers that he's invisible, and Gina, a middle-aged black woman who is the only person who can see him. The two set out on an existential quest to cure his condition. When asked about his urge to explore the conflict-fraught relationship between the two ethnicities, Gomolvilas, a Thai-American, confesses, "That really terrified me! How much do I really know about the black experience, and what right do I have to write about it?"

Gomolvilas's plays spring from the mind of a Midwestern kid turned southern Californian (at age seven) with Thai immigrant parents. Gomolvilas was crowned "Prince" early on when his Indianapolis kindergarten teacher couldn't pronounce his given name, Khamolpat. Young Prince never attended a real play until he saw David Mamet's Oleanna at San Francisco State. There, he started out writing screenplays ("mostly about werewolves") and, as he tells it, "ended up with an M.F.A. in playwriting."

Unlike older and more established Asian-American playwrights such as David Henry Hwang and Philip Kan Gotanda, Gomolvilas populates his plays with many ethnicities, a panoply of hyphenates-Caucasian, African-, Chinese-, Filipino-, Thai-, Korean- and Japanese-Americans. Like his colleagues, his plays address race, sexuality and other social concerns, although it's his wacky, pop-cultural sense of humor, his penchant for quirky characters and his interest in the supernatural that set him apart.

"The images we get of Asian Americans in the mainstream media are stereotypes," he laments. "Chinese waiters, subservient women, Jackie Chan demonstrating that all Asian-American men are martial artists!" His gaze wanders out the window to Golden Gate Park as he formulates his thoughts: "Something about the core of what each nationality in American experiences--the issues of displacement and identity--remains the same."

Similarly, Gomolvilas's gay identity is inherent in his work, but he writes about both straight and homosexual relationships. "So much of what he writes is very intense, personal conversation with rather high stakes," observes Bee's director, Arturo Catricala, "whether the characters are talking about homosexual rights or racial tensions. It's weighty stuff. And he does it with a light touch."

Gomolvilas's 1999 Debunking Love, developed at the Bay Area Playwrights Festival and premiered at San Francisco's New Conservatory Theatre, reflects some of Gomolvilas's writing dilemmas. ("Can I ever write a play that doesn't have a gay male Asian in it and be taken seriously?" he wonders.) In Debunking Love, a gay, Asian mystery writer is harassed by friends to be a social activist. Desperately seeking love and trying to avoid political commitment (while he churns out novels about a straight, white detective), he drives himself into a frenzy. Like most of Gomolvilas's plays, Debunking combines short scenes and monologues delivered directly to the audience. "This is a train wreck," announces Debunking's anti-hero at the beginning, accompanied by an appropriate slide projection. "This is a metaphor for my love life." He then tosses his slide projector remote to a front-row audience member: "Here, hold this." Gomolvilas typically breaks the fourth wall, sometimes in the form of goofy, ersatz quiz shows. Big Hunk o' Burnin' Love (which premiered at Los Angeles' East West Players) starts off with a monologue: "Hi, I'm Winston. I have low self-esteem."

Like one of his favorite playwrights, Craig Lucas, Gomolvilas sometimes opts for a fantastical context. Growing up in a non-practicing Buddhist household, he developed an addiction to New Agey "self-help stuff" and traditional religious texts; an oddball search for faith often finds its way into his plays. "I draw from Buddhism, Christianity and Taoism--and from UFO literature--to make my own bastard religion," he says.

Thus, in the hilarious, tightly crafted Big Hunk, a Thai-American is faced with the ancient family curse of spontaneous combustion unless he weds before age 30. Will he marry the mail-order Asian bride his nutty parents have imported, or will he defy fate and look for true love before exploding?

In The Theory of Everything, which won the Singapore Repertory Theater International Herald Tribune playwriting award and a PEN Center USA West 2001 Literary Award for Drama, a motley, multi-ethnic crew gathers on a sleazy Las Vegas wedding-chapel rooftop to look for UFOs, Gomolvilas's metaphor for a universal sense of longing. Various relationships evolve, resolve and crumble as the long night unfolds.

Looking back over his short, fast-moving career--which began with a 1994 Lawrence and Lee Playwriting Award for All Men Are Liars and includes the publication of his Donut Holes in Orbit in a 1998 Ensemble Studio Theatre anthology--Gomolvilas notes, "Marianne Williamson once said something like, 'Self-help can become narcissism.' When I first started writing, my plays were very personal, but they're getting wider in scope with more of a socio-political agenda. It sounds didactic, but I'm at the point where I'm concerned with society, race, age, this country."

Those concerns all materialize in Bee. Reviews for the play's March premiere were mixed--not surprising for a high-stakes comedy that uses a variety of metaphors and stylistic devices and strives to cover so many contemporary issues. It's true, as some critics complained, that Gomolvilas's main characters receive short shrift for the sake of larger explorations. In response to that, the playwright says, "You have to balance things: fantasy/reality, humor/social issues, different racial viewpoints, larger social/smaller personal issues. You have to sacrifice something."

Gomolvilas considers failures and perceived failures as "absolutely necessary" to his burgeoning career. "What I've learned over the years is that different people will have different opinions about any play I write," he says with a shrug.

As the first local playwright-in-residence at the New Conservatory, he's currently adapting Scott Heim's novel Mysterious Skin ("about white people in Kansas"). He's also circulating a screenplay ("thus far, a bit too subversive for Hollywood") that he co-wrote, and developing a new musical. "Now I'm only going to write what makes me happy," Gomovilas asserts.

Jean Schiffman is a San Francisco-based freelance arts writer.

© 2001 American Theatre