←Recommendations of The Words of Ants

Kang's genius lies in genuinely asking the audience to listen: major plot points pass in only a word or two, encouraging a close attention to even the smallest details. A bitingly incisive script about how we justify circumstances that fate pushed us into – turning them retroactively into personal decisions, in order to live with a difficult past. How our understanding of the present shapes our judgement of history, and who benefits when a rich culture deems a poor culture worth preserving.

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.

Premiere Stages, the professional Equity theatre company in residence at Kean University, is pleased to recognize The Words of Ants as a Semi-Finalist in the 2025 Premiere Play Festival. The Words of Ants rose through a competitive process conducted by Premiere staff and an external panel of professionals to become distinguished among 805 submissions. The panel was impressed by how the play's drama is simultaneously straightforward yet mysterious. Our congratulations and thanks to Xiaoyan.

Kang has a thematic powder keg for her subject matter and beautifully personalizes it before expanding the story's scope, all while maintaining the emotional throughline. This piece will have you wrestling with language, meaning, and who is granted the privilege of interpretation. Smart, high-minded, and thoughtful without being didactic; I love this play.

Getting to read this meditative poetic play was such a privilege. Xiaoyan Kang weaves together a play that combines history, language, feminism, culture, heritage marriage, memory into a poignant and heartrending portrait of a woman at a crossroads of all the above intersections. An absolutely entrancing read.