How does an actor from Malaysia come to the Auckland stage? Brilliantly, apparently. Sam Brooks interviews Dawn Cheong, currently starring in Silo Theatre’s The First Prime-Time Asian Sitcom.

Dawn Cheong has a CV unlike any actor on the New Zealand stage. Since graduating from Toi Whakaari in 2008, she’s worked mostly in Malaysia and Singapore, including on hit sitcom I Eat KL (think Sex and the City, but in Kuala Lumpur). She’s been named most promising newcomer at the Malaysian Film Festival, and nominated for best actress. She’s a writer too: her play Remnants of the Silk Maker’s Ghost was runner-up at the 2012 Adam Awards.

Given her successful stage career, it’s surprising that The First Prime-Time Asian Sitcom, Silo’s new show, marks Cheong’s Auckland stage debut. It’s also her first role in New Zealand since 2017, where she starred in The Night Mechanics in Wellington. That role, as a corrupt watermonger in a post-apocalyptic New Zealand, won her the Outstanding Performance award at that year’s Wellington Theatre Awards. (I was lucky enough to see the show – her award was richly deserved.)

So, after years overseas, how did she end up back in Auckland starring Silo’s latest show? In classic 2022 fashion, Cheong ended up landing the role of The Showrunner thanks to a group chat.

“My mum died, and I had to go through this horrific time until then – taking care of her, feeding her, changing her, everything,” she says. “After she died, I was a bit of a floater, and went in and out of really dark places.” 

Part of her support system was a group chat with some fellow Toi Whakaari graduates, including director Ahi Karunaharan, who at the time was developing The First Prime Time Asian Sitcom. 

When Karunaharan suggested she take the role, Cheong leapt at the chance. “There’s nothing for me in Malaysia”, she remembers thinking. “I may as well just go to New Zealand, chill out, enjoy nature, and live under a Jacinda Ardern government.”

Returning to New Zealand is a major move for Cheong, who had been based in Malaysia since shortly after graduation. “I didn’t want to play the fish and chip shop girl, I wanted to play Lady Macbeth”, she says. (She did, in fact, go on to play Lady Macbeth, at the Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre.)

Since graduating in 2008, Cheong has more or less exclusively worked between Malaysia and Singapore. Her CV is dotted with films (In Between Floors, Cuak), TV shows (I Eat KL, The Race to Love) and plays. She acknowledges she’s had access to roles and opportunities she’d never have had if she’d stayed in New Zealand.

Still, the New Zealand performing arts landscape has changed dramatically since Cheong graduated from drama school. Then, Asian creatives were barely represented, either on or off stage (the same goes for screen roles). Now, 15 years later, Asians are thriving on both stage and the screen. It’s not that a show like The First Prime-Time Asian Sitcom wouldn’t have been programmed when Cheong left New Zealand – it probably wouldn’t have had the chance to be written in the first place.

“Welcome to the live taping of the first ever prime-time Asian sitcom in Aotearoa”. Written by Korean-New Zealander Nahyeon Lee, Silo’s new play bills itself as a “genre-messing black comedy”, with characters that “swing between subversion and stereotype”. 

Cheong’s character, The Showrunner, is the sitcom’s ringmaster. The role demands a delicate balancing act; she spends much of the show’s first half mostly watching and reacting, and has to take centre stage in the second act, when we barely know who she is. The Showrunner’s character who has to tenaciously navigate the choppy waters of TV production, while also coping with the burden of trying to be everything to everyone, whether it’s her fellow writers, the actors, or the audience. (Most impressively, Cheong has to do all of this while mastering the notoriously difficult New Zealand accent.)

Karunaharan, the director, says he knew from the start that the industry-savvy Cheong  had the skills and experience to bring the challenging role to life. It’s telling that the power of the show’s second scene comes from not what the other actors are saying, necessarily, but for how they’re weighing slowly, surely, on the silent shoulders of The Showrunner.

“Her performance needs to be adrenaline-charged, roaring and delicate,” he says. “I think Tāmaki will be absolutely enthralled by her, she’s so compelling to watch. Audiences are just going to want to watch more of her.”

The play attacks, unashamedly, how Asians are represented in the New Zealand media. While it’s something Cheong is familiar with from her time living here, she says it isn’t as personal an issue as it is for the local actors in the company. The struggles of representation look very different in New Zealand than in predominantly Asian Singapore and Malaysia.

There are issues that are universal, however. “Who owns Asian images, and what are healthy images? What are the effects of performing stereotypes?”, she says. “We’re exploring those topics rather than deciding what’s wrong and what’s right.”

Cheong brings up an exercise the company did partway through rehearsals. They asked themselves how many jobs they’d lost because they were Asian. Predictably, a lot of people said “lots”. Then, they asked how many jobs they’d got because they were Asian.

“They also said lots, so it’s not as easy, or as black and white, as that.”

The First Prime-Time Asian Sitcom is a landmark production for many reasons. It’s the first Korean play produced by a mainstage company with an all-Asian cast, the first play by Nahyeon Lee who’s already a force in her own right. It’s also the first time Auckland gets to see what Dawn Cheong can do. 

When Cheong finally, brilliantly, takes centre stage, it’s absolutely electric. She breaks open The Showrunner and all her complexities like she’s reaching down into the stage itself and tearing it in two. It’s confidence with all the skill and experience to back it up; confidence with nothing to prove. She’s already a star, she just needed us to look up.