In Lookingglass Theatre’s adaptation of Studs Terkel’s oral history Race, Cheryl Hamada plays a submissive geisha who commits hara-kiri. “I’ve been regarded this way of course,” she says. “The geisha stuff of feeling oppressed is very subtle. I didn’t know it until I was an adult. For a young girl, to be seen as pretty, nice, feminine–all flattering things–is a blessing. The problem comes in when you get to be an adult, when you express aggression, anger, not-so-delicate emotions–the negatives of being a person. We can’t be sweet all the time, in the workplace or relationships.”
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In high school Hamada was “an outsider, a nobody. But it was OK to be that.” She’d always enjoyed performing for others, and her major at Northeastern Illinois University was speech and drama. “My parents were supportive but didn’t believe I could make a living at it,” she says, “so speech therapy was the fallback.” She had parts in student productions but was never cast in an Asian role.
The 70s were a giddily experimental time in theater, and when Hamada started graduate studies in speech therapy at Northern Illinois University she joined the campus theater. Her directors were insistently colorblind and had her play parts in The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, and Hedda Gabler, but she never thought she could have a career in acting. “They wanted blonds, so I was told,” she says. “And I’d never make a believable blond. There were no Asian roles.”
Unlike a growing number of Asian actors who agitate for roles–such as the late Quincy Wong, whom she knew through the local Asian-American theater company Angel Island–Hamada sees her glass as half full. She’s appeared in a dozen local shows in the past two decades, earning a Jeff citation for Next Theatre’s Innocent Thoughts, Harmless Intentions–a recognition she felt legitimized her as an actor. “I had my best entrance in Claudia Allen’s The Gays of Our Lives, camping it up,” she says, recalling her broad caricature of a Hong Kong brothel madame. “I’m not just Lotus Blossom.” However, in the corporate videos and TV commercials–which had allowed her to quit being a speech therapist in 1987–she was always an Asian office worker, proof of the sponsoring company’s commitment to diversity.
Lookkingglass didn’t guarantee the participants roles in the adaptation. Hamada wasn’t counting on getting one–she was busy doing a cooking program that aired during WTTW’s begathon and had a small part in the Jack Nicholson movie About Schmidt. Last September she was called back for another workshop. This time, she says, “about half of the original 16 returned. The new people were mostly company members and white. We were beyond the ethnic experiences and into the interaction between whites and others. We posted cards with cliches and slurs and acted them out. We had fun. Chunks of a script began to emerge. Yet we were still in the dark. Joy and Schwim might have been too–they seemed to be getting ideas by watching the tapes.”
