Before Broadway stardom and a Tony Award and a thriving TV and movie career, BD Wong was a young New York actor working to earn his union card by doing a traveling play.

A play for young people, as it happens.

 “I remember it very fondly,” Wong says now of rising before dawn and heading to remote schools on Long Island to appear as Androcles, who famously pulls a thorn from a lion’s paw.

“It was done in commedia dell’arte style. We were all running around, hitting each other with soft stuff. And at one point, I ran out in front of a canvas backdrop of a cave. I said, ‘Where has (the lion) gone?’ And 500 kids started screaming, ‘He’s in the cave, he’s in the cave!’”

Wong recalls being “totally unprepared” for that level of sheer enthusiasm — and totally enchanted by it.

And now, some three decades later, he’s tapping into that youthful zeal for live performance once again, with “Alice Chan,” a new work for La Jolla Playhouse’s annual Performance Outreach Program Tour.

Wong, who won a Tony in 1988 for his lead performance in David Henry Hwang’s “M. Butterfly,” wrote “Alice Chan” with his longtime friend and collaborator, Robert Lee. (Wong also directed the piece.)

It’s the highest-profile commission yet for a program that generates a world-premiere play for young audiences every year. And it grew out of close Playhouse and San Diego connections that began in earnest when Wong was invited to be the theater’s resident artist in 2015.

BD Wong (right) with his collaborators Robert Lee (left) and set/costume designer Lex Liang. Courtesy La Jolla Playhouse

It’s far from the first youth-centered piece that Wong — seen most recently in the movie “Jurassic World” and TV’s “Gotham” — has worked on.

During his Playhouse residency, he teamed with San Diego State University’s graduate musical-theater program to workshop “Mr. Doctor,” a musical he hopes to stage with Rosie’s Theater Kids, the outreach program (launched by the actress Rosie O’Donnell) for which he originally wrote the piece.

Wong also has seen plenty of touring youth-theater initiatives at other regional theaters around the country, and says “the POP Tour is the most successful and ambitious of all the ones I know.

“The things that to me make it unique are, first, the volume — 20,000 kids will see the play," which tours schools through April 1 and has public performances at the Playhouse this weekend. "And that’s absolutely connected to their future relationship with theater.

“The other thing is, it’s a much more complicated and well-executed set than the old days when I was putting up pipes and hanging a canvas drop,” he adds with a laugh.

“Alice Chan,” whose four actors (Maggie Carney, Jyl Kaneshiro, Dana Wing Lau and Kyla Garcia) make an art of constructing Lex Liang’s intricate set anew at each stop, is a comedy that has its roots in potentially serious subjects.

Its title heroine is a fifth-grader who’s known as the “Queen of the Science Fair” at Chaffey Elementary School, and shows little interest in the arts. But when a teacher tries to expand Alice’s horizons by casting her as the lead in the school play, it upends the expectations of everyone involved.

“It’s really the first encounter she has with the arts — this girl whose entire life up to that point has been about academics and achievement,” says co-writer Lee, a professor in the graduate musical-theater writing program at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.

And ultimately, “it’s about Alice understanding what the role of the arts is.”

Wong notes that the play explores two key themes: landing on your feet after the unexpected happens, and becoming comfortable with yourself.

The seeds of the piece were planted about eight years ago, when Lee, a lyricist and librettist whose musicals include “Heading East" and "Takeaway," was transfixed by a fleeting scene in a TV news documentary.

The show was about a predominantly white high school that was staging a production of “The Wiz” in order to get more African-American students involved. In the middle of the piece, there was one brief, unremarked-upon image of an Asian-American student who also was auditioning.

When Lee told Wong about the documentary, they both began recalling real-life examples from their childhoods for the character whom they came to know as Alice Chan.

Initially, the two writers say, the play had a more pronounced focus on race. Once it evolved as a work for young people, though, that aspect became less explicit.

“This is a play about an Asian-American young lady whose Asian-American-ness is background to the story,” as Wong puts it. “She can’t be played by another actor because of it, which we find really useful and even progressive. But she’s not there to tell an Asian-American story.”

Wong adds high praise for Playhouse artistic chief Christopher Ashley and education director Steve McCormick (who leads the POP program) for shepherding works that offer substance as well as entertainment, and don’t talk down to young people.

“They don’t do what Chris would call ‘bunny-suit plays,’” says Wong. “They’re really plays that are resonant for kids.”

​

Copyright © 2016, The San Diego Union-Tribune