Pan Asian Repertory Theatre culminates its 46th Milestone Season with a nine-day festival of diverse NuWorks 2023, an experimental series of self-created work from innovative artists exploring an eclectic range of genres and techniques using poetry, text, dance and music.
Pan Asian Rep is the most veteran Asian American theatre company on the East Coast. Tisa Chang founded Pan Asian Rep in 1977 at Ellen Stewart’s La Mama ETC with the vision to promote equity and access that Asian Americans artists can equally follow, focusing on stories of probing social justice issues with distinctive Off-Broadway Productions, Tours, National Outreach and Community Service.
Program A - June 3 & June 9 @ 7 PM
Dream Reunion by Lyra Nalan
Dream Reunion follows Ting, a Chinese woman living in America, who runs over various possibilities of her reunion with her mother Jun back home, hoping to find the right words that lead to a perfect scenario.
SELL ME: I am From North Korea by Sora Baek
On her 15th birthday, a North Korean girl, Jisun makes the heart-wrenching decision to sell herself to an old Chinese man to make money for her dying mother's medications. However, after risking everything by crossing the Tumen River into China, she learns that she is not sellable and finds herself on the streets.
Program B - June 4 @ 3 PM & June 8 @ 7 PM
A Sisyphean Dream by Sanhawaich Meateanuwat
A group of immigrant actors meets in a dream space to discuss their dreams as immigrant actors. Through challenges, self-doubts, and homesickness, they wonder if they made the RIGHT choice to travel across the world to pursue their dreams.
Voices From Asian Wars by Jan Barry & Jenny Pacanowski
After returning from the wars overseas, follow two veterans from different eras, different wars, navigate their experiences through an interactive writing workshop with the audience. Supporting your veterans is listening to them. Connection, conversation and creativity provide successful reintegration for veterans to thrive in civilian society.
Program C - June 6 & June 10 @ 7 PM
Cowgirl Katarungan Is Fixin' To Fight by AJ Layangue
Cowgirl Katarungan, a Filipinx-American cowgirl truth-teller/detective, recounts four vignettes: "LaBute's Lament," an imagined trial of the infamous writer; "The Case of the Mysterious Composer" (a.k.a. Larry Clark, a.k.a Keiko Yamada); "The Bloody Song of Roldan," a retelling of the landmark miscegenation legal case Roldan versus Los Angeles County in 1933; and ends with "Karen," a dispatch to a well-established villain in every BIPOC life. All in all, four very true tales. Well, mostly true. And she does it in verse.
Extraordinary Alien by Sai Somboom
Extraordinary Alien is a solo show based on my lived experience expressed through movement/dance, comedy, monologues and video projections. It is a reflection on my intersectional identities as a gay, cisgender Thai man, a recently naturalized citizen of the United States and an actor/dancer navigating the audition and performance landscape in New York.
Program D - June 7 & June 11 @ 7 PM
Period. by Mandarin Wu & Da Xu
A tragicomedy starring Handy Mandy, as she tap dances through the conflicts of being an aging modern woman navigating through current social climate and regularly incapacitated by the periods (menstruations) in her life. She also tries to contend with the fear of being an Asian American woman, and how other unfortunate woman meet their ends to senseless murders, a period on their lives. On the stage, a screen with a hidden opening is placed. Moving images, slogans and shadows are projected. Handy Mandy jumps, falls and transforms through that slit of a portal.
Did My Grandfather Kill My Grandmother? by Cody Wilson
The story takes the audience through Cody's life and shares the pivotal moments, conversations and investigations that they encountered from childhood into adulthood; unraveling their mother's tragic story of how she survived the Vietnam War as a newborn baby. As the audience follows a journey to find out "what it means to be Asian American" they are faced with the ever changing belief systems and realities Cody formed as they grew older; "I am different", "I do not belong", "I am hated."
