The Process Series at UNC will feature an engaging new work by an acclaimed playwright in November. Commissioned by the Goodman Theater in Chicago, Lauren Yee's King of the Yees will be performed tonight and tomorrow, November 6 and 7, 2014, at 8:00pm in Studio 6 of Swain Hall at UNC-Chapel Hill. The performance is free and open to the public with a $5 suggested donation.
"King of the Yees is my attempt to cram everything I love and less than love about Chinese-American culture into a play," says Yee of her work. "It's also an ode to my father and the difficulty of passing down stories you never truly had a firm handle on. It's about the communities we choose and the ones we inherit, and the inherent difficulties in navigating those fields."
Take any Chinese last name, and there exists a corresponding "family association" with branches in each major American city: Chinese men's clubs formed over a hundred years ago after the building of the Transcontinental Railroad. The Wongs, the Chans, and -of course- the Yees. For nearly twenty years, playwright
Lauren Yee's father Larry had been a driving force in the Yee Family Association. And now Lauren is writing a play. About legacy, about obsolescence, about the great and powerful house of Yee! Or something like that. Amid a backdrop of crumbling Chinatowns and all-too-lifelike museums, Lauren races through history, space, and the fourth wall to find her father's story and chronicle this disappearing piece of American culture.
"We are so pleased that playwright
Lauren Yee has chosen the Process Series as a developmental stop on her way to the play's premiere at the Goodman," says
Joseph Megel, artistic director of the Process Series. "King of the Yees represents Lauren's search for both a cultural history and personal identity, the loss of that history, and the holding on to memory. Lauren explores the role her father played in Chinese-American history and her own."
New York-based artist
Daniella Topol will direct the piece, which will feature
Christine Lin (New York), Brenda Lo (Raleigh), Dave Shih (New York), and Dennis Yen (San Francisco). Two guests performers from China's from Fun Er Theatre will assist in creating the performance.
Lauren Yee is a playwright born and raised in San Francisco. She received her bachelor's degree from Yale University, and her MFA in playwriting from UCSD, where she studied under
Naomi Iizuka.
She was a
Dramatists Guild fellow, a MacDowell fellow, a MAP Fund grantee, and a member of
The Public Theater's Emerging Writers Group. She has been a finalist for the Jerome Fellowship, the PONY Fellowship, the Princess Grace Award, the
Sundance Theatre Lab, and the Wasserstein Prize. Her play Samsara has been a nominee for the
Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the L.
Arnold Weissberger Award. Her work has been published by Samuel French.
Her full-length work has been produced at AlterTheater, Artists at Play, City Lights Theatre Company, Company One, fu-GEN, the Hub Theatre, Impact Theatre, Moxie Theatre, Mu Performing Arts, Pan Asian Rep, SIS Productions, and others.
Lauren's work has also been developed at Lincoln Center Theatre/LCT3,
The Public Theater, Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre,
Playwrights Realm,
Second Stage Theatre,
Williamstown Theatre Festival, Aurora Theatre, the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, East West Players, the Hangar Theatre, Kitchen Dog Theatre, the Magic Theatre, Orlando Shakespeare Festival, PlayPenn, and the Playwrights' Center.
Her playThe Hatmaker's Wife was an Outer Critics Circle nominee for the
John Gassner Award for best play by a new American playwright. Ching Chong Chinaman was picked as a top 10 play of the year by City Pages and the East Bay Express, and Crevice was a Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle nominee for Best Play. Other honors include three Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival playwriting awards, Kumu Kahua Theatre's Pacific Rim Prize, and writing fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Byrdcliffe Artist Colony, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the El Gouna Writers' Residency, the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, and the New York Mills Cultural Center. She has also received funding from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, Theatre Bay Area, and UCSD's Institute for International, Comparative, and Area Studies, as well as an award from PlayGround's New Play Production Fund.
Lauren is a Time Warner Fellow at the Women's Project Playwrights Lab and a member of the Ma-Yi Theatre Writers Lab, as well as the Shank playwright-in-residence at
Second Stage Theatre and the Page One resident playwright at
Playwrights Realm. She is currently under commission from the
Goodman Theatre, Lincoln Center Theatre/LCT3, Mixed Blood Theatre, Encore Theatre Company (with support from the Gerbode Foundation), and TheatreworksUSA, a theater for young audiences.
Learn more at
www.laurenyee.com.
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