MAY 1: Staged reading of The Butterfly of Chula Vista by Giovanni Ortega, dir. Jesca Prudencio, as part of AAP’s New Play Development. At Divina’s BaranGay & Grill in Chula Vista, Libertad discovers freedom and belonging in a new drag persona … which conflicts with nursing school. With karaoke hits (in English, Spanish, Tagalog!) and themes of family, identity, acceptance.
MAY 19-22: In David Henry Hwang’s The Dance and the Railroad, set during the 1867 Chinese American railroad workers’ strike, the idealistic Ma and the independent Lone grapple with the hard labor of working on the railroad and the dream of practicing traditional Chinese opera. AAP’s Katherine Chou directs this Asian American classic for A Noise Within’s “Noise Now” program.
JUNE: It’s the return of Artists at Play … At Play! Join us at LATC, our new artistic home, as the producing team once again steps out from behind the curtain with original short plays created from absolute honesty—this time with AAP Intern Sandy Nguyễn!
OCTOBER: AAP’s next mainstage is the world premiere of This Is Not a True Story by Preston Choi, direced by Reena Dutt. CioCio from Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly completes her suicide—only to wake up realizing she is trapped in a never-ending loop of her story. Then Miss Saigon’s Kim joins the void … This Is Not a True Story unravels the history of Orientalist art and theatre, and looks at what happens when the tragic Asian heroine takes control of her own story.
Artists at Play — A Los Angeles-Based Theatre Collective 