Architecture of rain
75 Minutes, 4W
Physically housed in a glass home of forgetfulness, Sol, Scy, and Silina rebuild and remember All-Grown-Up in the wake of her death. A girl who died at the age of eight, All-Grown-Up enters as a memory, repairing the house with her presence and taking it down with her when they forget. Architecture of Rainis the story about the secondary death of a loved one with forgetting. From Scy's departure from home to boarding school, to Silina's rebellion against her mother Sol's grief, the narrative follows the three living women as they struggle to reconcile their individual recollections of All-Grown-Up.
FINAL BOARDING CALL
120 Minutes, 3W, 4M
Final Boarding Call tells the stories of the current Hong Kong protests. The play revolves around the interconnected stories of seven characters whose backgrounds and perspectives run the spectrum – a protesting brother and flight attendant sister struggling to keep her job; a Mainland Chinese mother and her estranged Hong Kong daughter; a non-Cantonese speaking reporter and her Indian partner; and an American expat CEO and Hong Kong lover living in the shadows.The play begins and ends with a flight, an entrance into the Hong Kong protests and how the politics we see on the news every day affects the citizens of Hong Kong in their day-to-day lives. It gives the audience a window into China's grip on global capitalism. How far will they go to fight for family, freedom, and the right to be heard?
Anna and Eloise are eight-years-old when their best friend and classmate Deidre drowns in a kayaking accident that they survive. Wake begins at Deidre's funeral tells the story of their friendship from ages 8 to 64. We see them as they first experience death and grief, through the changes in their friendship as they grow and become unknowingly impacted by the complications of their single parents, Wing and Corrie's, relationship. Anna and Eloise are played by 8-12 year-old actors during the entirety of this play, an exploration of what it means to grow in and out of friendship with someone who is so deeply imbedded in your childhood.
WAKE
100 Minutes, 3W, 1M
THE CONSERVATION OF PARITY
95 Minutes, 4W, 4M
In 1936, Wu Chien-Shiung boards ocean liner President Hoover in Shanghai for California. She is 24-years-old, she is headed to America to study physics, and promises to return to her family in China soon. Over the next four decades, WWII and the Chinese Civil War will take this promise from her. She will become Dr. Wu, the first and only Chinese woman to work on the Manhattan Project and atomic bombs. She will marry and naturalise as an American citizen, and by the time she returns home, all her family will be dead. The Conservation of Parity tells the story of Wu's first decade in America, and how her determination to aid China turned her into one of the most instrumental physicists in American history. It is a story filled with science and history, but at its core, it is the journey of a woman who comes to America and continually tries to find her way back home.
delicacy of a puffin heart
90 minutes, 5W
In a small San Francisco apartment in the 1990’s, Meryl and Ana Sofia, a lesbian couple, attempt to conceive a child through in-vitro fertilization while navigating Meryl's bipolar disorder II. In the same apartment two decades later, their daughter, Robyn and her roommate Hadley are forced to navigate their friendship through Robyn's cancer. In the struggle to take control of their lives, relationships, and illnesses four women unravel the complexity of their Asian, Bulgarian, and outsider to American identities and experience the potential loss of female friendship and sense of self: What does it mean to love someone honestly even when they are incapable of being honest with themselves?
little stubby wings, like she could’ve glued them on
70 minutes, 6W, 1M
Little Stubby Wings, Like She Could’ve Glued Them On is a fantastical journey of one woman’s experience of trauma. The play is our protagonist Stefani’s story and each character takes shape according to her memory and understanding them. From the victims of each car accident to fictional characters from popular animations such as Totoro, Dora the Explorer, and Up, Little Stubby Wings shows the complexity of how trauma and grief can be triggered. The play begins with a car accident in Baltimore, Maryland, involving two elderly Chinese passengers on American Airlines, and immediately slingshots Stefani back to her sister’s death. In trying to rewrite the death of her sister Mei, Stefani takes a pilgrimage through her memories with Mei. From Totoro’s Catbus to George and Martha, the children’s book, Stefani finds herself thrown back and forth between the fantasy of what could have been and the reality of what she has lost.
TONGUE GRAFTING
90 minutes, 4W, 3M
Tongue Grafting is a play written in three languages, English, French, and Mandarin. Tongue grafting refers to both a horticultural transposing of seeds into a different ground and the forgetting and acquisition of a new language or culture. It follows a young woman, Sylvie, as she begins to discover her own sense of loneliness at home with her single father and ailing grandmother, the sense of cultural displacement in the United States where she attends university, and finally in France where she tries to root herself in a new home, a new tongue, and an unsuccessfully new body. Translation is the act of going from point A to point B, and Sylvie is constantly caught between the two. Sylvie flees to France for the summer to start over, with a completely new language and home, only to find Ninon, her host mother, an eccentric but neglected matriarch of her family. It is in France that Sylvie begins to find the disconnect between her physical desires and lack of physical intimacy with men. Where does loneliness stem from? And how does one begin to heal?
my dead husband bought a gun and came back for me today
25 minutes, 1W
Commissioned by Yangtze Repertory Theater, my dead husband bought a gun and came back for me today is a one-woman adaptation of the traditional Liao Zhai story “The Considerate Husband.” Laney has recently become widowed after her husband died of a hate crime. She is lying naked in bed after her husband’s funeral listening to a grief counseling group on Clubhouse when her dead husband returns with a gun. A piece about grief, rage, and race in America, my dead husband bought a gun and came back for me today spotlights the stories of Asian women who have to deal with it all.
OCEAN VIEW
10 minutes, 2M
Commissioned by the Rubin Museum for its 2020 Edition of the Spiral Magazine, Ocean View is a play about the impermanence of lineage, identity, and home. As Choeden urges his son Gyalpo to speak more Tibetan, Gyalpo learns about the geopolitical stigmas and realities of his father’s home country for the first time.