REALITY CHECK

As a former literary manager for East West Players, I helped to develop several of the plays mentioned in Laurie Winer’s review of a collection of new Asian American plays (“A Collection With Much Missing,” Aug. 31). I dispute her comment that its editor, Velina Hasu Houston, makes a “tired” argument by overstating “the cultural resistance” to Asian American plays.

Does Winer really think that the production of a few plays in Southern California represents a nationwide acceptance of Asian American storytelling? She produces a wonderful list of outstanding Asian American writers--but I dare her to enter a Waldenbooks in Kansas City and find a volume by David Wong Louie or Jessica Hagedorn.

To bolster her belief that Asian American playwriting is some sort of easy sell, Winer has also tracked down a Web site that boasts 38 Asian American theater companies nationwide. Yet her review appears on the very same page that reports East West Players’ struggle to survive the year.

Perhaps Winer thinks that Asian American stories meet with no “cries of indignation” because she’s never tried to get an Asian American book on a college reading list. Perhaps she sees a sunny life for Asian American writers because she lived elsewhere when a Times reviewer criticized the Taper production of Philip Kan Gotanda’s “The Wash” for being, well, not Asian enough. Or because she is unaware of the March suicide of Garrett Omata, whose “charming romantic comedy” she specifically admires.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should say that I am also the editor of “Asian American Drama: Nine Plays From the Multiethnic Landscape,” forthcoming from Applause Theatre Books. In his introduction to that volume, David Henry Hwang writes that nobody is an absolute authority on cultural identity--including, I would suggest, Laurie Winer.

BRIAN NELSON

Woodland Hills