In Jesa, Jeena Yi Wrote the Asian American Family Drama She Always Wanted to Be In

Who doesn’t love an American family drama? A family, sitting in their living room, fighting and rediscovering each other is the bread and butter of the American theatre. Actor Jeena Yi has long loved classics like Death of a Salesman and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, even as she knew she would never be cast in those plays.

Yi is Asian American, and as she points out, "As an actor, the one lament I had was there was never a show that I could be in. If it's about a family, you have to kind of look like the family. Often the families are white, so I could never be a member of the family unless it was specifically written in a certain way or somebody was doing a very specific take.” And an all-Asian Death of a Salesman is not exactly a frequently performed concept.

So, Yi wrote her own Korean American family drama. Jesa is currently running at Off-Broadway’s Public Theater through April 12, co-produced by Ma-Yi Theatre Company. At the same time, Yi is part of the ensemble cast in David Lindsay-Abaire’s newest play The Balusters on Broadway, where she plays the vice president of a homeowner's association. Oh, and she’s (as of this published date) 18 weeks pregnant. 

“I'm excited to tell this baby, ‘You were on Broadway when you were in utero!’” exclaims Yi one morning in rehearsals for The Balusters.

She was in sweats, looking tired yet satisfied. Jesa was opening that night, and she had gone through the biggest hurdle of the entire process: the week where she was rehearsing two shows at the same time.

“I was rehearsing all day [for Balusters], then going to the last four or five hours of tech [rehearsal] for Jesa. And then rewriting Jesa at night, and then try to get it back [to the actors] early in the morning before I started rehearsal [for The Balusters] at 11,” says Yi with a wry smile. “I feel really lucky, and I’m just trying to be present and enjoy each thing as it goes. So even when I was exhausted, I was like,’” here she mimics tiredly typing, while intoning, “‘I wanted this. It's okay.’”

It’s more than okay. Jesa received positive reviews from critics, with many praising the play as a well-crafted, modern family drama. Jesa takes place in Orange County, California, as four Korean American sisters gather to mark the anniversary of their parents’ death. In traditional Korean culture, a jesa is a ritual used to memorialize those who have passed—family members cook their loved one’s favorite meals and pour them a teacup of soju. And it's believed on the night of the jesa, the departed's spirit comes back for a visit.

“I wrote a show that I've always wanted to see,” says Yi. “I wanted to represent a Korean American family. I always feel like the Asian American community isn't always considered part of the American experience within pop culture and in a lot of narratives … I wanted to just contribute something out there so someone who looked like me could be in a show, or watch a show and recognize all the little things—recognize the rice cooker, recognize these slippers and the little subtle things that are very Korean American.”

Usually, when a writer puts a family drama on the stage, there’s the temptation to assume it’s autobiographical—especially when it’s a writer of color. Yi admits that even when her own parents came to see the show, she had to warn them that the play was not about them. “I told my mother multiple times, ‘The mom in this show is not you,” laughs Yi. “My mother is  the polar opposite of the mother in the show.”

Yi’s parents immigrated from South Korea in the 1970s. Both retired now, her father was a tailor while her mother worked at a garment factory. Yi and her two older brothers were born and raised in Southern California. She went to college at the University of California, Berkeley, where she initially set out to major in Landscape Architecture. But at Berkeley, those plans changed. As Yi recalls: “I joined a club at UC Berkeley called 'Theater Rice' (I know, an unfortunate name that did not age well). But its motto was 'Asians on stage by any means necessary.'” She wrote and acted in sketch comedy skits, and did improv around the Berkeley campus. Yi eventually moved to New York to pursue an MFA from Columbia. Since then, she's made new work her specialty, acting Off-Broadway, regionally, and on screen (such as when she got in a pool with Annette Bening in Nyad).

For Yi, the reason she loves watching family dramas is what they reveal about character and relationships. Though Jesa is not autobiographical, it does touch on themes both specific and universal. Because the four sisters in the play are Korean Americans, the children of immigrants, they can’t quite agree on how to perform the jesa (do they bow first or pour the soju first? Do they wear socks or do it barefoot?). Through this event, the sisters also realize they all have vastly different recollections of their parents—one sister considered Mom the victim of a bad marriage, while another sister considered their mom "hateful." One was dad's favorite while another sister hated him.

“How do these people who grew up in the same house with the same parents grow up to be such different people out in the world?” remarks Yi rhetorically. “We have such different perspectives of who our parents are and the things that we see and we don't see. People talk about parents having favorites, but I also think kids have favorites … There's something about that that I find is universal. I wanted the play to be universal in that way, too; I wanted people who weren't Korean to still relate to it.”

Now that Yi has birthed her play baby, Jesa, she can focus on The Balusters, which begins previews March 31 and opens April 21 at the Friedman Theatre—and on her human baby. Her pants are just beginning to feel tight, and she’s talking with the Balusters costume department to give her clothing plenty of elastic. 

In the world premiere play, an HOA in a historic district is thrown into a frenzy when a new member proposes the construction of a stop sign, creating a comedy about bureaucracy and how to keep order when there’s a diverse group of people with different agendas and interests. Yi does find it interesting that at the moment, she’s focusing on two works that are exploring human nature in the most quotidian of circumstances.

“It’s watching these people and how they treat each other: One is a family, and the other’s a group of neighbors, which is its own fascinating dynamic,” muses Yi. “It's also one of the things that [director Kenny Leon] talks about, he reminds us a lot of, ‘You have to remember that you're coming back again to this meeting.’ You want to keep the peace. I think we all do in our everyday lives—we all walk this fine line the same way.”

But how do you keep the peace, while advocating for what you want and not being swallowed up by the group? It’s a balancing act, something that Yi, in this busy season of her life, is more than an expert at now. And she hopes that in doing these human studies, it inspires the audiences to see a bit of themselves in the imperfect people on that stage: “It's a microcosm of a bigger thing for sure. It's fascinating. I hope people come and enjoy that. They might come for a comedy, but hopefully they'll leave with a larger understanding of themselves in the world.”