Pan Asian Rep culminates its 48th Milestone Season with the annual NuWorks Festival, an experimental series of self-created work from innovative artists exploring an eclectic range of genres and techniques using poetry, text, dance and music.
The 2025 NuWorks Festival includes:
Your Movie Guide to Life
Written and performed by Bee Vang
Direction and dramaturgy by Jeff Liu
Bee Vang, actor and lifelong cinephile, weaves together existential horror in films with his inherited histories—both personal and geopolitical. This one-man show delves into the shaping power of cinema, Hmong history, his anti-war activism and his leading role in Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino.
Chasing the Butterflies
Created and performer by Myka Cue
Co-directed by Katusha Jin & Sophie Zmorrod
Chasing the Butterflies is a solo performance tracing a daughter’s memory of her late father through movement, music and magic. Inspired by the Filipino belief that butterflies carry the spirits of the departed, it explores how we keep those we’ve lost alive and the quiet ways in which love endures.
Kotsu-Kotsu
Written by Momo Akashi
Directed by Saki Kawamura
Kotsu-Kotsu follows a female BL manga artist quietly battling breast cancer while chasing deadlines and holding onto her creative spark. Behind the romance she draws lies her own story of resilience. As her footsteps echo onstage, you may hear your own—and discover the gentle, whimsical kindness of the world.
Boat Noodle Burglary
Written by Chacha Tahng
Directed by Chloe Chow
Two Thai-American coworkers take a spontaneous road trip for a special ingredient in a Thai noodle soup recipe. Grief overflows, and ancestry refuses to be forgotten. What can we hold onto when the connection to our roots begin to fade? And what happens when memory is stained, like a cookbook?
Even Here
Created by Aiyu Collective
Two strangers find themselves in a room amongst long-lost letters, murky memories and a bag of potatoes. Yifei and Max exchange stories in hopes of navigating the vacuum of their unexpected circumstance. Seasons pass, memories fade and time begins to reveal the identities they once held.
Where I’m From
Written and composed by Howard Ho
Directed by Jully Lee
Howard grew up in the legendary AAPI enclave, the San Gabriel Valley or SGV, a suburb of Los Angeles. But its status now as a cultural hub and culinary hotspot is a shocking new development. Howard celebrates what it was really like growing up there from the 90s to today.
What Oppenheimer (2023) Did Not Show You
Written and performed by: Katsuto Sakogashira
Directed by Louis Blachman
What Oppenheimer (2023) Did Not Show You follows one family’s quiet morning in Hiroshima—cooking, arguing, laughing—before the bomb falls. As time moves forward, the play invites us to witness what war takes away, and to notice what we often overlook: the fragile, everyday moments that make a life.
Just a Yellow Cab in New York City
Directed by Youlim Nam
Sometimes the messiest rides take you exactly where you need to go. In the backseat of a yellow cab, Regina, a tipsy Brooklyn transplant on the cusp of 30, dumps her birthday monologue to a cabby. What starts as a night of disappointment transforms into an unexpected moment of understanding between two strangers.
