Fu-GEN Theatre Company’s Potluck Festival — a night dedicated to plays-in-development by Asian-Canadians and, as a perq, to excellent pan-Asian cuisine — has always been one of the most popular offerings at CrossCurrents, Factory’s annual festival of new works by up-and-coming playwrights of colour. The downside to Potluck was its brevity, and this year’s CrossCurrents (whose artistic producer is also fu-GEN’s artistic director, Nina Lee Aquino) corrected that by leaving Potluck out entirely, and saving it for its own, week-long stint at Factory beginning this weekend.

“It’s quite the milestone,” says Byron Abalos, intern producer at fu-GEN, who is also presenting his new play, Brown Balls, at Potluck, and performing in another of the festival’s plays, Marie-Leofeli R. Barlizo’s Stroke. “This is the first time ever there’s been an Asian-Canadian new-plays festival. It’s us as a community of theatre artists saying we’re finally ready, with the attention and talent, to put on something like this.”

Potluck’s line-up of plays is diverse, but is unified by an impulse to tell the kinds of identity-based stories that still don’t get told that often in Toronto’s mainstream theatre venues. Abalos’ Brown Balls, for instance, is a lighthearted examination of Asian masculinity, in which three guys dressed as Bruce Lee, Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan take the audience hostage for the evening in order to make them listen to issues that mainstream cultural consumers rarely hear about, or perhaps care to listen to.

“Somewhere along the line I began to notice I was somewhat of an other, especially as I was getting into the sexual economy of dating,” says Abalos, who is first-generation Canadian with a Filipino background. “There was an odd feeling of, ‘OK, I grew up with all these white guys around me, so why do I feel different all of a sudden? And why do I feel as if that difference is not good, that it somehow makes me inferior?’” Abalos explains that his characters begin with bravado about this perceived inferiority — a sort of why-can’t-we-have-it-too cockiness — but end up questioning the still-limited definition of masculinity present in all ethnicities.

Potluck’s orientation around food takes a similar approach, exploiting stereotypical cues audiences might relate to and then trying to effect a redefinition and questioning of those cues. Every work is sponsored and catered by an ethnically appropriate resto — Chinese, Korean, Japanese, etc. — food being one of the broadest ways in which Torontonians can engage in multiculturalism. Abalos actually characterizes this as a bit of a “lure”; he points to Jovanni Sy’s performance piece A Taste of Empire, which takes place at Nella Cucina (876 Bathurst), and involves Sy cooking Rellenong Bangus (Filipino stuffed fish) while giving a vehement, problematizing lecture on colonialism.

“We never say, ‘Hey, if you want to be a part of our Asian playwright’s lab you have to write an Asian story,’” notes Abalos. “It’s not about that at all. If you wanted to write a story set in Germany during WWII that’s your prerogative. We support the artist and the stories they want to tell. What’s important to us is that these stories come from a truthful, passionate place, and that the work is of the highest calibre. And at this point I can say with confidence that it stands up to that of any other theatre company in Toronto, or in Canada for that matter.”