FLIGHT OF A LEGLESS BIRD
Flight of a Legless Bird follows and braids the lives of Robin and Leslie, two queer artists, from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. Robin, a filmmaker in New York’s West Village, confronts the reality of a HIV/AIDS diagnosis; Leslie, a Cantopop star and actor, grapples with his personal hurdles and newfound fame in Hong Kong. Robin’s and Leslie’s worlds collide by chance, establishing an emotional bond between the two men that defies time and space. A play told in Cantonese, Mandarin, and English, Flight probes the fraught entanglement of artmaking and societal crisis, while illuminating the enduring forms of relation forged across the imagination, media, continents, and bodies of water.
140 minutes. Cast Size: 6-8, flexible
University production, McCarter Theater Center, produced by the Lewis Center for the Arts, 2024
Workshop staging, CHUANG Stage, PAO Arts Center, and Asian American Theater Artists of Boston, 2023
Finalist, 2023 National Playwrights Conference and the 46th Bay Area Playwrights Festival
Distinguished Achievement, 2022 Paul Stephen Lim Playwriting Award, Kennedy Center
DICTIONARY OF THE UNSAID
It is the summer of 2013. Tiantian is eleven years old. He travels to Fukuoka, Japan from Guangzhou, China for a cultural exchange trip and stays with the Ishidas, a host family blasted apart by a great loss. Tiantian does not speak Japanese. The Ishidas do not speak Mandarin. Neither speak English very well. But in their week together they must find a way to talk. Dictionary of the Unsaid is a play that visits aquariums, churches, poetry workshops, and Tinder, while examining how little words we need to communicate what’s important. If there is such a thing as a horticulture of language, what would it look like?
90 minutes. Cast Size: 5
Reading, The Juilliard School (2025)
BLACK MOUNTAIN
In 1933, John Andrew Rice conceived and founded Black Mountain College, renowned for incubating a roster of legendary American artists and redefining liberal arts education itself. Over half a century later, Christine, Sam, and Wing-Mui, are three roommates at Taplin College, navigating the complexities of art, friendship, discipline, and ambition as young, Asian-American undergraduates. Then the two timelines intersect. Black Mountain is a play about old ghosts haunting new studios, the intergenerational bond between teachers and students, the mythologies of community, and Ruth Asawa trying to escape her own wedding.
150 minutes. Cast Size: 10
AOKASHIMA ISLAND
A tenured professor discovers Craigslist missed connections amidst her divorce. A sprightly manager of a post office collects letters sent to the dead. Meet Joan and Rinko– two sisters who have not seen one another in forty years. They reunite on Aokashima Island, where buried truths await at every turn. Aokashima Island is an elegiac play about kindness as a form of tenacity, the weather and weathering, and what it means to love someone across difference, disagreement, and distance.
120 minutes. Cast Size: 6