Stefani Kuo

Pearl’s Beauty Salon is a play about home and Hong Kong. Maru is visiting Pearl’s Beauty Salon for her first Brazilian wax when she falls into the rabbit hole of what Hong Kong is to her – through history, fantasy, memory, nostalgia, and interrogations of colonialism, identity, ownership, and belonging, Maru takes us on an emotional journey in Pearl’s Beauty Salon through three different eras. This play moves in concentric circles: from Hong Kong to Continental Wax Land, USA, to the artifice of theatre, the audience is asked to question, participate, and engage with the constantly changing tides, as Maru does throughout the play.

Anna and Eloise are second-graders who lose their best friend and classmate Deidre in a kayaking accident that they survive. Wake begins at Deidre’s funeral and follows the friendship of these two girls played by preteen actors as their characters age from 8 to 64. Beginning with this early experience of death, the girls and their single parents, Wing and Corrie, become entangled in one another’s lives. The play explores where grief and love root in relationships, as these two families grow together and apart.

Little Stubby Wings, Like She Could’ve Glued Them On is a fantastical journey of one woman’s experience of trauma. The play is our protagonist Stefani’s story and each character takes shape according to her memory and understanding them. From the victims of each car accident to fictional characters from popular animations such as Totoro, Dora the Explorer, and Up, Little Stubby Wings shows the complexity of how trauma and grief can be triggered. The play begins with a car accident in Baltimore, Maryland, involving two elderly Chinese passengers on American Airlines, and immediately slingshots Stefani back to her sister’s death. In trying to rewrite the death of her sister Mei, Stefani takes a pilgrimage through her memories with Mei. From Totoro’s Catbus to George and Martha, the children’s book, Stefani finds herself thrown back and forth between the fantasy of what could have been and the reality of what she has lost.

In 1936, Wu Chien-Shiung boards ocean liner President Hoover in Shanghai for California. She is 24-years-old, she is headed to America to study physics, and promises to return to her family in China soon. Over the next four decades, WWII and the Chinese Civil War will take this promise from her. She will become Dr. Wu, the first and only Chinese woman to work on the Manhattan Project and atomic bombs. She will marry and naturalise as an American citizen, and by the time she returns home, all her family will be dead. The Conservation of Parity tells the story of Wu's first decade in America, and how her determination to aid China turned her into one of the most instrumental physicists in American history. It is a story filled with science and history, but at its core, it is the journey of a woman who comes to America and continually tries to find her way back home.

Final Boarding Call tells the stories of the current Hong Kong protests. The play, written in Cantonese, Mandarin, and English, revolves around seven characters in Hong Kong. From extremist Hong Kong vigilante to Mainland Chinese mother, the play begins with a flight, a brief entrance into the Hong Kong protests and how the violence sensationalised by the news affects the daily lives of Hong Kongers in the city. But it ends in a stalemate, an unpredictable future that we are living in now. This is a play about ordinary Hong Kongers. It is a story of war, of desperation, and the fight for freedom. These people are real, they are still fighting, and their stories deserve to be told.

In a small San Francisco apartment in the 1990’s, Meryl and Ana Sofia, a lesbian couple, attempt to conceive a child through in-vitro fertilization while navigating Meryl's bipolar disorder II. In the same apartment two decades later, their daughter, Robyn and her roommate Hadley are forced to navigate their friendship through Robyn's cancer. In the struggle to take control of their lives, relationships, and illnesses four women unravel the complexity of their Asian, Bulgarian, and outsider to American identities and experience the potential loss of female friendship and sense of self: What does it mean to love someone honestly even when they are incapable of being honest with themselves?

Physically housed in a glass home of forgetfulness, Sol, Scy, and Silina rebuild and remember All-Grown-Up in the wake of her death. A girl who died at the age of eight, All- Grown-Up enters as a memory, repairing the house with her presence and taking it down with her when they forget. Architecture of Rain is the story about the secondary death of a loved one with forgetting. From Scy's departure from home to boarding school, to Silina's rebellion against her mother Sol's grief, the narrative follows the three living women as they struggle to reconcile their individual recollections of All-Grown-Up.