How to Debunk MSG Myths? Go Back in Time and Alter History, Of Course

This is where the play deviates a bit from personal biography. Ami decides that the best thing to do is to travel back in time to prevent her ojiichan from ever inventing MSG, thus redeeming her family’s reputation and saving the entire world in the process. As you do.

Madcap sci-fi twists notwithstanding, Green says Exotic Deadly draws on her own adolescent experience more than any of her previous work. The play taps into the self-consciousness that Green felt about her Asian identity, especially when it came to the “lovely, nutritious bento” lunches that her mother packed for her every day. Those lunchboxes became a daily battle, Green recalls, even though she loved her mother’s cooking. She especially relished her traditional Japanese breakfasts: a full spread of grilled fish, rice, miso soup, pickled plums and, her favorite, the sticky, funky fermented soybeans known as natto. (“I would obviously never take natto to school,” she says.)

Green remembers having bottles of the MSG seasoning powder at home, but her mom kept them hidden in a little cupboard — as though she, too, believed there was something shameful about the stuff.

“Later on, when I thought about that shame of internalized racism, I really thought back to the image of my mom keeping that bottle hidden away,” Green says.

Green, whose recent work includes a writing credit on Hulu’s genre-bending adaptation of Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, knew she wanted to write a play about her family connection to MSG. But every time she tried, it always felt a little bit too clichéd. It was only after the COVID shutdown hit, she says, that she stopped worrying about whether the “gatekeepers” of the theater world would approve of the play. She wrote Exotic Deadly mainly just to make herself laugh.

Though the play does deal with heavy themes of racism, Green says, it’s also by far the “craziest” play she’s ever written. “It breaks every rule,” she says. “It has a bajillion characters. Sometimes we change locations three times on a page.”

And since pseudoscience had imbued MSG with so many fake, insidious properties, Green thought it would be fun to give MSG even more fake effects: “In this play, MSG makes you really good at kung fu fighting. It can make you time travel. It heals your bones.”

Then there’s the character who goes by “Exotic Deadly” (played by Francesca Fernandez) — a phrase that Green took directly from an old article about MSG. The name also evokes her memories of her early days as a stage actress, when every role for Asian American women seemed overtly sexualized. “Even in Shakespeare, they wanted you to play the prostitute,” she recalls. In the play, Exotic Deadly is the new girl from Japan who serves as Ami’s foil — who loves MSG, is proud of her Asian identity, and is full of rage toward the systems and stereotypes that oppress her.

The play ends with a big spectacle, and the idea, Green says, is for the climactic moment to feel the way that MSG tastes.

For Asian Americans who grew up in the heyday of AZN Pride, the reclamation of MSG has been a major project of the past dozen years, championed by chefs like David Chang and Anthony Bourdain, and food scientists like Harold McGee. These days, MSG pride is as mainstream — and as widely memeified — as boba pride, and “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome” has been thoroughly debunked.

Even still, Green says that every time she wonders if a play like Exotic Deadly is still relevant after such a sea change, she’ll see a comment from a theater colleague or a random poster on the internet who says, in full earnestness, “Finally, someone is talking about how deadly [MSG] is.”

And while COVID helped birth the play, it also set off a wave of anti-Asian sentiment in the U.S. In March 2021, when Green was preparing for the first big stage reading for Exotic Deadly at The Old Globe in San Diego, the Atlanta spa shootings happened — eight people, including six women of Asian descent, shot and killed by a young man who told police he had a sex addiction.

Exotic Deadly doesn’t deal directly with the violent side of exotification — to be clear, by Green’s own account, the play is a pure comedy. But the spate of anti-Asian hate crimes in the past few years has made her think about how for so many immigrants, their culture’s food is often the very first thing they’re made to feel ashamed of.

“We’re taught at such a young age that it’s okay to ‘other’ certain kinds of culture and food,” she says. “So when I see violence, when I see anti-Asian hate, I actually feel like it’s all extremely connected.”