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Collage #1

This play was supposed to be something else. 

It’s kind of weird to share something so early in the process. But it has challenged me to get the wheels turning again. Whenever writers are interviewed about how they make work, I find the process bit often vague and unsatisfying. Hopefully something in this series helps to demystify the process, while making us who are participating feel the gentle and necessary pressure to actually finish the damn thing. 

For me, I start with something that kills me not to hear said aloud, or makes me excited to see done in a way I’ve never seen.

The inspiration for this piece is the intersection between a conversation around cancel-culture, and the way minorities often create from a place of trauma. Often our narratives are based on the most urgent stories that need to be told, the ones to expunge so we can breathe - which are often the most traumatic. As most of my plays are based around identity and the complexity of being Chinese-Kiwi in love and life, I wanted to write something fun, romantic, funny and free. However, as I embarked on the last few months of a writing residency, several conflicts with white straight men happened to me all in a row, and shook me back to that all too familiar place of anger and the deep crackling burn I often feel, and find impossible to shake, when there are things left unsaid.

I’m sick of seeing our narratives stuck in talking about our traumas but never being able to move past them. I decided to create an abstracted narrative journey of something a lot of minorities feel - trapped by the weight of their bad experiences, and yearning to get to the light. I want this play to acknowledge both - the cathartic release of anger, and the lightness of what we want to get to - but also the nuance of what happens when we take revenge, and how black and white justice might be satisfying, but the way to move forward and affect change can only come from rediscovering love and compassion. Well, that’s one of my working questions, anyway. 

As I create the world of the show, imagery is at the fore for me right now as I want it to be super physically and visually cathartic. I’ve got three threads of story worlds which are the vessels for my philosophical argument. I chose to do it like this because I love ensemble plays - bodies moving around! So many possibilities for stunning emotionally visual work! Let’s cast as many POC as possible! Having multiple  threads also hopefully lifts my argument from being about one particular story or world and places more focus on the theme, the moral core. We’ll see what happens in actuality. For now, here are some of the threads in visual form.