APA: Tell us a little bit about your background. Where did you grow up, and how did you get your start as a writer?
Alexander Woo: My family is Cantonese from Hong Kong, and they came to the United States in the 50s. I was born and raised in New York and suburban New Jersey, and I was in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton, and that's where I first got the idea that I could possibly write professionally. Then, I attended drama school at Yale, and for the next seven years after that, I was "working" as a playwright. I use the term loosely, because no one actually earns an income strictly from playwriting, but that's how I met Prince [Gomolvilas] around 1999.
There was a certain kind of parallel kinship in our styles of writing. We both like to use humor, and at the time, not that many Asian American playwrights used comedy in their work. Back in the day, most of the work I was seeing was quite humorless. When I think about Asian American theatre then, I see a stage, four pools of light, and four Asian women crying: "Why are you doing this to me?!" [he says in a pitch-perfect Cantonese accent, while lifting his chin up to the ceiling and waving his fists in the air]
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