When we set out to create Multi Meets Poly: Multiculturalism and Polyculturalism Go On a First Date (directed by A. George Bajalia and starring Gordon Chow and Virginia Lee Marie Martinez), I knew I wasn’t writing a conventional play. I was trying to personalize and dramatize a theoretical argument. I wanted two big, disruptive ideas—multiculturalism and polyculturalism—to flirt, provoke, seduce, and challenge each other in real time, letting audiences experience an intellectual and emotional wrestling match up close. The result was a 2014 video play that twelve years later is as timely and relevant as ever.
For years, I’ve said that Silk Road Rising (now Silk Road Cultural Center and its digital media arm, Polycultural Institute) was born of a multicultural politics and quickly migrated to a polycultural aesthetic. In many respects, Multi and Poly, the plays' two featured characters, are the embodiment of that journey: one is focused on defending and dignifying distinct cultural communities, and the other insists on unleashing the messy, transformative traffic between communities. Their “date” is essentially a discursive battle over how culture works, how power operates, and the tensions and complexities that complicate conversations about diversity, inclusion, authenticity, and belonging.
Multi Meets Poly is what I call pedagogidrama—drama as a teaching and learning tool, a theatricalized intellectual workout, more lean-forward than lean‑back. The ideas at hand aren’t camouflaged in subtext; the ideas are the story. Multi and Poly debate definitions of culture, argue over cultural relativism, racism, and essentialism, tussle over metaphors such as the mosaic and the melting pot, and test each other’s comfort with hybridity, elasticity, continuity, and change. In doing so, they also expose the limits of our favorite frameworks and the tendency of institutions to commodify “diversity” rather than redistribute power.
Why share this now, with the Polycultural Institute community? Because so many of the fault lines that undergird this story have only sharpened. We’re living through overlapping crises—authoritarian and exclusionary politics, wars and displacement, normalization of genocide, manufacturing and stoking of cultural chasms, and renewed battles over whose stories count and whose don’t. Multiculturalism continues to do the important work of protecting the integrity of communities under threat and reminding us all that representation truly matters; simultaneously, polyculturalism invites us to participate in the transformation of people, cultures, and communities through dynamic interchange, shared struggle, and coalitional politics. That tension—between preserving and evolving—sits at the heart of our ongoing "Rebuilding Syria" and "The Re-Churching of America" podcast collections, and demonstrates our commitment to polyculturalism as a life practice, not simply a theory.
I’m returning to this piece now because Americans are wrestling with these very questions in classrooms, organizing spaces, faith communities, arts venues, digital publics, and around kitchen tables. If you’ve ever felt grateful for multicultural inclusion and expansion while suspicious of its reductiveness and constraints, this conversation between Multi and Poly might offer language for your discomfort—and tangible tools for thinking beyond it. My hope is that you won’t just watch passively, but that you'll pause, argue with the characters, and ask yourself where, in your own work, are you operating within a multicultural mindset, where are you engaging with polycultural possibilities, and what becomes viable when your inner Multi and Poly actually work together?
Whether revisiting Multi Meets Poly or watching for the first time, I hope you enjoy the first date!
