Karina Cowperthwaite

Karina Cowperthwaite (she/her) is a director and playwright based in Cambridge, MA. A graduate of Harvard College with a joint degree in English and Theater, Dance and Media, Karina is passionate about uplifting Asian American work and challenging her own definition of what Asian American theater is and can be. As Co-President of the Asian Student Arts Project (ASAP), she directed a Pan-Asian adaptation of Legally Blonde, the first musical on Harvard's campus with an all Asian cast which was featured on NBC News as well as writing, directing and acting in an original play titled Ugly Feelings at the Loeb Drama Center which was nominated for a Hoopes Prize and futher workshopped as part of Chuang Stage and Fresh Ink Theatre's New Play Development residency. For her work in college, Karina...

Karina Cowperthwaite (she/her) is a director and playwright based in Cambridge, MA. A graduate of Harvard College with a joint degree in English and Theater, Dance and Media, Karina is passionate about uplifting Asian American work and challenging her own definition of what Asian American theater is and can be. As Co-President of the Asian Student Arts Project (ASAP), she directed a Pan-Asian adaptation of Legally Blonde, the first musical on Harvard's campus with an all Asian cast which was featured on NBC News as well as writing, directing and acting in an original play titled Ugly Feelings at the Loeb Drama Center which was nominated for a Hoopes Prize and futher workshopped as part of Chuang Stage and Fresh Ink Theatre's New Play Development residency. For her work in college, Karina was awarded the Lee Patrick Award in Drama, The David McCord Prize and Harvard College Women's Center Transformational Leadership Award.

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Scripts

Ugly Feelings

by Karina Cowperthwaite

Cast Size
6
Genre
dark comedy,
experimental

Ugly Feelings explores the questions of mixed-race Asian American identity that have followed me throughout my life. I've grappled with how my whiteness is in conversation with my Asianness. What does it mean to be simultaneously steeped in white privilege but to also be a person of color? What does it mean to racially belong? How is multiracial identity informed by our families? Friendships? Romantic...

Ugly Feelings explores the questions of mixed-race Asian American identity that have followed me throughout my life. I've grappled with how my whiteness is in conversation with my Asianness. What does it mean to be simultaneously steeped in white privilege but to also be a person of color? What does it mean to racially belong? How is multiracial identity informed by our families? Friendships? Romantic relationships? How do the media and the communities we interact with and belong to understand mixedness? How does their understanding inform how we see ourselves and the world? As strange hybrid creatures, the perfect examples of post-racial assimilation? Or a distinct and whole identity to celebrate, challenge, and be proud of.

The desire to belong haunts Jenny, a biracial Chinese American 17-year-old girl navigating the world of angst, confusion, and teenage fantasy that is her senior year of high school. The play is organized as a series of vignettes – warped memories, distorted dreams, twisted nightmares – all filtered through the lens of Jenny’s mind, which obsessively racializes the people, places, and relationships in her life within the binary facets of her identity.

In “The Mixed Metaphor: Why Does the Half-White, Half-Asian Protagonist Make Us So Anxious?,” Andrea Long Chu writes that:

“If there is one conclusion to be reached from the mixed Asian experience, it is this: People want race. They want race to win them something, to tell them everything they were never told; they want friendship from it, or sex, or even love; and sometimes, they just want to be something or to have something to be…There is, after all, a reason that people sit together: They don’t want to be alone.”

Jenny wants race. She wants it to win her something, tell her everything she was never told, give her friendship, sex, even love. Above all, she wants race to give her something to be. At the end of the day, she just doesn’t want to be alone.

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