CBC, FOB—if these acronyms don’t mean anything to you (and the first has nothing to do with our esteemed national broadcaster), then you’re obviously not a banana boy.

Banana Boys, a script by Leon Aureus, adapted from the novel by Terry Woo, is the story of five men in their early 20s who are all CBC—Canadian-born Chinese—as opposed to FOB (fresh off the boat). At the top of the play, which runs Wednesday (February 28) to March 17 at the Firehall Arts Centre, one of them, Rick Wong, is already dead, a victim of his hard-driving, success-seeking lifestyle. Banana Boys begins at Rick’s funeral, then flashes back to introduce us to his close-knit group of friends during their student years at the University of Waterloo.

On the phone from his home in Toronto, Aureus, who was born in the Philippines and came to Canada at the age of four, says his experience as a Filipino Canadian gave him access to the characters’ experiences even though he’s not Chinese. “There are slight variations, but they’re outweighed by the similar experience of an Asian Canadian growing up in Canada,” he says.

Although the play’s five protagonists call themselves banana boys—yellow on the outside, white on the inside—each has a different relationship to his ethnicity. Mike, who has always dreamed of being a writer, succumbs to parental pressure (it takes the form of a surreal game show in which the career choices are doctor, lawyer, businessman, and engineer) and studies medicine instead. Dave, a computer geek, is rabidly sensitive to racism: he keeps a racial-incident log in which he rates his responses to bigoted comments. “He has these big hang-ups about white people keeping him down,” says Aureus. “There were moments when I thought ”˜Should I tone this down?’ But then I thought I’d be doing a disservice to the character, because there are people out there who do have that anger.”

Rick has perhaps the most complex relationship to race. He uses drugs to boost his energy as he claws his way up the corporate ladder; he even affects an FOB accent in the workplace as a means of getting ahead. It’s also a misguided attempt to connect with his cultural roots, which come to torment him in the form of Ching-Shih, a female vampire.

“You know there’s that type, and not just in the Chinese Canadian community, who’s very much about accumulating money and wealth and fame, and yet it destroys him,” says Aureus of Rick. “What’s unique to the Chinese Canadian part of his story is that he’s fighting these opposing cultures. He grew up in Canada and yet he still feels separate from it, so he tries to co-opt the Chinese culture, which he doesn’t really understand, and ultimately it becomes this Frankenstein monster.”

Aureus says he can relate to both Rick and Mike. “I always wanted to be a writer, I always wanted to be an actor. But when I went to university, I thought ”˜No, it’s time to get serious.’ I was in B. Comm., I had my own computer business, but ultimately I couldn’t deny it [the desire to act]. By the time I finished university, I had a job at a consulting firm. And I was in it a few months, and I had to quit.”

Aureus returned to theatre and became a cofounder of fu-GEN (short for “future generation”) Asian Canadian Theatre Company, a Toronto company dedicated to developing Asian artists. “I was really focused on continuing my career as an actor and I was really disappointed with the quality of opportunities out there,” recalls Aureus. “The roles are gangster or computer geek, and you’re like, ”˜Wow, this is all that’s out there for me.’ So instead of just complaining about it, I decided to be proactive about it and actually start making a home where you can develop these artists.” Banana Boys became fu-GEN’s first full production, and enjoyed such critical and popular success with its Toronto premiere in 2004 that it was picked up for the Magnetic North Theatre Festival in 2005.

Part of the play’s appeal is that instead of focusing on the well-explored area of intergenerational conflict, the heart of its story is the friendship between the five men. “That’s another reason why we chose this piece as our first offering from fu-GEN,” he observes. “Because it really does buck the usual standard of identity play, where it’s always, ”˜Oh God, I have hang-ups with my parents.’ Yes, the parents are there, but there’s much more.

“We got in trouble for that at the beginning,” he continues, “when we were saying, ”˜We’re tired of the fresh-off-the-boat stories.’ People said, ”˜Oh, you guys are self-haters, you don’t want to celebrate your past and your history.’ No, that’s not the case. What we’re trying to say is that we want to move beyond that now; there’s more to us than the standard archetypes that already exist. So I’d like to think of this play as an evolution of what an Asian Canadian play is.”