INTERVIEW: Kristina Wong on the empowerment of the Auntie Sewing Squad
Photo: Kristina Wong stars in Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord at the New York Theatre Workshop. Photo courtesy of Joan Marcus / Provided by Matt Ross PR with permission.
Kristina Wong’s new show, entering its final week of performances at the New York Theatre Workshop, retells the story of the Auntie Sewing Squad, a group of hundreds of volunteers who answered Wong’s call during the pandemic to sew masks for people who desperately needed them. The monologue piece, called Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord, combines humor and autobiography to hold up a mirror on what the last 20 months have been like. It’s a daring play, one that tackles the issues of the pandemic head on, and one that also feels necessary and filled with generosity.
For Wong, an accomplished performance artist and comedian, the creation of the piece was risky. She honestly didn’t know whether it would be received well; after all, the COVID-19 pandemic has claimed so many lives and continues to rage around the world. Were theatergoers ready to laugh? “I feel very glad it’s going over well because nothing would be worse than doing a pandemic play in a pandemic, and everyone hates it,” Wong said in a recent phone interview.
The personal story told in the play begins March 20, 2020, only a few days into the pandemic. That was when Wong sewed her first mask, and then four days later she started a Facebook group that she lovingly called the Auntie Sewing Squad.
“And people were like, ‘Oh, this could be your next show.’ I’m like, ‘Fuck you, no one wants to watch a show about the pandemic.’ I certainly don’t want to go through this all over again,” Wong said. “Everyone is living through this, so why would anyone want to watch a show about it when this is over? But I think when I was just 10 days after starting the group, I was like on the phone with garment companies to get donations. I was on the phone with organizers around the country. I felt like if this had been a corporation, it would have been Amazon built in 10 days, but it was a mutual aid, no-profit situation. It was just so weird.”
As the project continued to grow, there was even more evidence of the need for masks and the willingness of the volunteers to rise to the occasion. Wong found herself building her leadership skills and business acumen in order to take control of the situation. She was taking phone calls from a variety of people and groups, all with a need for masks, and more masks, and more masks.
“I just felt like this is so crazy, but it also really hit me in those 10 days that it was mostly Asian women,” she said. “There was a few others, of course, but it was really like, wow, we’re not just the people being targeted in this moment for ‘starting this virus and spreading it.’ But we’re also the face of people who are expressing a lot of solidarity and help because we know how to sew because our mothers and grandmothers did garment work and kind of passed this down to us. And this feels kind of significant that we are at the same time the face of the enemy, but also the people who are manufacturing this sort of protection and support for people who need it.”
In their own way, she and the team were re-creating the American manufacturing system, on a small scale, in their individual homes, with no personal contact. She called the experience “strange” and “weird,” a true crash course on understanding distribution and escalation in a matter of days.
“We couldn’t leave our homes,” she remembers. “It’s not like we all met at a factory and started sewing together. None of this infrastructure existed, and I was actively trying to create an infrastructure using the U.S. Post Office, using friends emptying out their drawers. And basically it created this whole remote factory of workers. That’s when it began to feel kind of significant in its storytelling, but mostly what became clear to me was, if civilization can survive this, and we talk about what happened in this time, I just would like a little footnote to remember that we stepped up and did this work. And we weren’t just people who were being beat up in the street or didn’t do anything or were politically neutral. We actually stepped up and did this.”
The Auntie Sewing Squad — ASS, for short, Wong is after all a comedian — eventually amassed a volunteer network of 800 people. They weren’t active at the same time, but they had a variety of skills, from sewing to cutting to driving to sourcing to making phone calls.
“We had to really do a lot of research and figure out, OK, what are the active distribution systems in a pandemic?” Wong said. “You can’t just mail something to someone who lives on the Navajo Nation and think that they are just going to knock on everyone’s door and give them a mask. We had to figure out how are things getting around in a time of crisis and get exact numbers of how to help things. Some people would say, ‘Just send us what you can,’ [but] ‘as much as you can’ can mean 25 masks to some people; it can mean 25,000 masks to others. So we had to really pin people down and get exact goal numbers for what to try to reach so that we weren’t wasting our finite time.”
How the New York Theatre Workshop came onboard is another fascinating story. The off-Broadway institution, where the play continues through Nov. 21, has been the home of many important pieces of theater, everything from Rent to Once to Slave Play. They were interested in working with Wong, who is billed as a NYTW Usual Suspect, and they reached out in March of 2021. That meant she only had a few months to pull Sweatshop Overlord together.
“Usually when we think about theater, we’re thinking about making it a year or two in advance because that’s usually how theaters program their seasons,” she said. “That’s very fast to turn around a show that’s not quite written about a time we’re still living in. There are many moments I have inside the show where I’m like, this feels like the evening news because literally the last scene takes place a month and a half ago. That’s very fast for theater, but there were doubts because for me it was more like we can’t just go back to theater and look at some story and pretend that the last 15 months didn’t happen. I was like, well, then how do I usher people through this?”
Helping Wong on her journey was Chay Yew, a director whose previous credits include The Architecture of Loss and Oedipus El Rey. The two decided that this monologue piece needed to be more intimate than a proscenium show would allow, so they crafted the 90-minute work on a thrust stage, with audience members sitting on three sides of the theater. Of course, they are masked.
“It’s that weird balance of finding humor, but not at the expense of all the loss that we had, but also finding what is there to celebrate in this time because it was so traumatic,” the performer said. “I had actually gone into this thinking this is the most patriotic thing I’ve ever done. I have never loved my fellow Americans so much before, and then I did not think that masks would become a political thing. It just seemed like common sense, right? And how did vaccines become political, like these basic, human, safety, science things. Of course, even in my most patriotic, naïve attempts … it still becomes the most political thing I’ve ever done.”
Throughout this experience, of running the Auntie Sewing Squad and creating this off-Broadway show, Wong has found that masks are a great equalizer. Her group made face coverings for people making six figures who were begging for masks. The people who were meeting that demand were volunteers — volunteers Wong grew to love.
“The most important people were usually the people that we considered maybe the lowest on the economic totem pole, garment workers,” she said. “The people who knew how to sew were actually the most useful in this moment. It was kind of amazing to see all these people willing to drive all the way from Orange County, drive an hour to pick up elastic to sew for people that they’ve never met before. It was incredibly moving to connect with people on that level of generosity, and that I really felt like was the one gift of this moment. I tell people in times of crisis — it seems counter-intuitive — but find ways to give, find ways that you have something to offer the situation, not something to take from the situation.”
She added: “I think it was the right choice to give. I think that was much better than panicking and feeling sorry for myself that I had suddenly been pushed out of work because there were people who were also pushed out of work. It was like, I can’t feel bad for myself. We’re all in this situation. I hope that is more the message I leave everyone in the show is that there are these amazing communities that unfortunately in this situation we met because of a crisis, but what I love is that our community is still very close. We’re still doing mutual aid that’s not related to just sewing masks, but to supporting some of the communities like Standing Rock and the Navajo Nation and unhoused communities that we’ve helped with masks, but helping them in other ways. I feel like for a lot of these aunties they felt empowered in a way they have never felt before. Some of them work in public health, but some like me have never been in that position where your labor was the difference of life or death in someone’s life.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord, written and performed by Kristina Wong, plays through Nov. 21 at the New York Theatre Workshop on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Click here for more information and tickets.
