Ma-Yi Theater Company Unveils 2024-2025 Season Featuring Three Premieres

Ma-Yi Theater Company has revealed its 2024-2025 season, which features three premieres presented in partnership with leading theaters across the country.

The season begins on October 8 in Minneapolis with the Children's Theatre World Premiere production of Drawing Lessons by Michi Barall. Experience the energy of a graphic novelist's imagination at work as you're drawn into this innovative story that magically takes place both on stage and on screen. Co-commissioned by Ma-Yi Theater Company and Children's Theatre Company, Drawing Lessons is directed by Jack Tamburri and runs through November 10 at the Children's Theatre Company Cargill Stage.

Following the success of Mike Lew's Teenage Dick in 2018 and Lloyd Suh's The Chinese Lady in 2022, Ma-Yi Theater Company returns to The Public Theater with the New York Premiere of SUMO by Lisa Sanaye Dring, Ma-Yi's 2024 Tow Playwright in Residence. Entrenched in an elite sumo training facility in Tokyo, six men practice, eat, love, play, and ultimately fight. Slated for Winter 2025, Ma-Yi's Producing Artistic Director and Obie Award winner Ralph B. Peña directs this powerhouse drama.

In a co-production with The Bushwick Starr and HERE, Ma-Yi Theater Company will present RHEOLOGY, the newest work by Obie Award-winning writer/director Shayok Misha Chowdhury, a 2024 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for his celebrated play, Public Obscenities. Running April 22-May 17, 2025 at The Bushwick Starr, RHEOLOGY is a performance memoir created and performed with his mother, the physicist Bulbul Chakraborty. In this production, an artist son studies his physicist mother while she studies the strange behavior of sand. Together, they try to understand the science and perform the story of how things flow.

Ma-Yi's Producing Artistic Director Ralph B. Peña said, “Thanks in no small part to our incredible institutional partners across the country, Ma-Yi's 2024-2025 season promises to be one of our most ambitious and rewarding seasons since our founding 35 years ago. We are grateful and thrilled to be working with some of the most innovative theaters in the country, including Children's Theatre Company in Minneapolis and our neighbors The Public Theater, The Bushwick Starr, and HERE, to present three vibrant plays that expand the scope of Asian American storytelling on stage.”

Additional information on Ma-Yi's 2024-2025 season follows.

Please visit www.ma-yitheatre.org for more information.

Ma-Yi Theater Company'S 2024–2025 SEASON

A Children's Theatre World Premiere Production

Drawing Lessons

By Michi Barall

Original conception by Michi Barall and Jack Tamburri

Directed by Jack Tamburri

Co-commissioned by Ma-Yi Theater Company and Children's Theatre Company

October 8-November 10, 2024 at Children's Theatre Company Cargill Stage (2400 3rd Avenue South Minneapolis)

Experience the energy of a graphic novelist's imagination at work! Dynamic, jump-off-the-page drawings show Kate's manhwa graphic novel coming together, even as she deals with school, friends, and how her Korean heritage fits into her American lifestyle. Will her contentious friendship with Paul help or hinder her progress? Will either of them ever find their true artistic voices? Get drawn into this innovative story that magically takes place both on stage and on screen!

Ma-Yi Theatre Company and The Public Theater
Present New York Premiere of

SUMO

By Lisa Sanaye Dring 
A co-production of Ma-Yi Theater Company and La Jolla Playhouse 
Directed by Ralph B. Peña
Winter 2025

Entrenched in an elite sumo training facility in Tokyo, six men practice, eat, love, play, and ultimately fight. Step into the sacred world of sumo wrestling, with the New York premiere of Lisa Sanaye Dring's mesmerizing new drama, SUMO. Akio arrives as an angry, ambitious 18-year-old with a lot to learn. Expecting validation, dominance, and fame, and desperate to move up the ranks, he slams headlong into his fellow wrestlers. With sponsorship money at stake, their bodies on the line, and their futures at risk, the wrestlers struggle to carve themselves—and one another—into the men they dream of being. SUMO is a thrilling new play set in an elite and rarely explored world. Obie Award winner Ralph B. Peña directs this powerhouse drama. 

The Bushwick Starr presents
a co-production with HERE and Ma-Yi Theater Company

RHEOLOGY

Written and Directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury

in collaboration with Bulbul Chakraborty

April 22-May 17, 2025 at The Bushwick Starr (419 Eldert Street, Brooklyn)

Obie Award-winning writer/director Shayok Misha Chowdhury's recent play, Public Obscenities, is a Pulitzer Prize Finalist and was singled out as one of the best theater works of 2023 by The New Yorker. His newest work, RHEOLOGY, is a performance memoir created and performed with his mother, the physicist Bulbul Chakraborty. Chakraborty's specialty is the titular science of rheology, the laws governing the malleability and movement of matter under force. Another of her loves is the poetic songs of Bengali composer Rabindranath Tagore. These songs paint glorious pictures about the drama of nature: monsoons produce drum-like thunder claps, rivers let loose their long hair into waterfalls, music flows through generations. Chakraborty learned these songs from her foremothers, then passed them on to Misha. In this production, an artist son studies his physicist mother while she studies the strange behavior of sand. Together, they try to understand the science and perform the story of how things flow.

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