This play is exact and insightful while still living next to the real world. With bright, fantastic imagery and dreamscapes, we're still unable to escape empathizing with every single character in this play. Xiaoyan lets you settle into an opinion for only a second before changing your perspective. It's brilliant.

This play is full of beautifully rendered characters with urgent needs, wants, and friction with one another and forces larger than themselves/each other. I appreciated the intimate/epic scope of it; such huge themes related to the inheritance and ownership of culture, gender roles in society, and generational conflict and legacy are explored through characters painted with gentle and hyper-specific brushstrokes. This is true in form, as well--realism mingles with big, exciting theatricality.

This play truly took my breath away. It has a slow burn pace that gently pulled me into the world of its characters. And, as the play opens up, spanning time and space and imagistic vocabularies -- while consistently asking difficult questions about privacy, ownership, and preservation as it pertains to language and culture -- it concludes with a final scene that really snuck up on me and delivered one of the most emotional experiences I've had at a play reading. Gorgeous and heartbreaking.