Yide Cai (蔡逸得)

White Phoenix is an epic family drama spanning decades and continents, following the parallel lives of Li CunYi and his sister Li CunXin after they are separated in a 1980s Chinese orphanage. As CunYi maneuvers through the rigid hierarchy of the Chinese Communist Party alongside his politically connected fiancée, Zhao YanYan, CunXin—now Annie Bradford—navigates a life of American privilege as the adopted daughter of a U.S. Senator and the secret lover of his son, Gabriel. Their long-awaited reunion during a 1993 diplomatic mission to Washington, D.C., and a subsequent trip to Beijing, exposes a web of political manipulation, espionage, and historical trauma that ultimately forces them to choose between their childhood promises and the powerful institutions they now serve. Using the incestuous complexities of their relationships as a metaphor for the fraught partnership between China and America, the play culminates in a tragic clash where personal identity is sacrificed to the relentless momentum of global history.

Fan Gao, his family and friends are Chinese workers trapped in a factory called Da Feng village; their job is to copy Van Gogh; their employers are from Germany and Hong Kong; their products are sold all over the world; they paint Starry Night in half an hour but get paid very little. They want to escape; they want to paint their own works; they want to be free.

A teabag who died a thousand deaths. “Steeped” reimagines the Boston Tea Party from the perspective of the tea itself. It goes beyond the night of 1773 by following Tea’s journey from the mountains of China, through a Labubu factory, a rock music club, to a present-day college lecture, to its final plunge into Boston Harbor, and a museum/tourist site. The play reveals how a commodity can carry within it entire histories of culture, and survival, as the tea insists on being seen and remembered.

“O True Apothecary” is a poetic, anachronological drama set in post-pandemic Shenzhen, refracted through the allegorical frame of Romeo and Juliet. The play centers on the volatile relationship between Emigrant, a Chinese artist returning home from abroad, and Expat, a Western history professor newly arrived in China. Their weekly Chinese lessons spiral into theatrical performance, intimate confession, and philosophical debate, as the boundaries between pedagogy and performance collapse. Pedestrian, a silent chorus, mediates and reframes events, embodying the everyday life of Shenzhen while also editing, recording, and destabilizing the storytelling.

In Episode 4, "The Toxicology Report," the investigation into the sudden death of folk music icon Rowan Skye focuses on her longtime manager and former bandmate, Matt Perkins. As Rolling Stone reporter Anna interviews the people at Rowan's Joshua Tree home, she uncovers a messy history of hidden romance, secrets, and decades-old wounds between the manager and his star. The mystery deepens when a police toxicology report reveals that Rowan died from an overdose of the exact prescription drug Matt secretly uses for his terminal cancer treatment. Mixing tense arguments with flashbacks to their high school band "The Pine", this episode shows a dying man desperate to save his legacy, leaving audiences to wonder if Matt's obsession drove him to murder.

"Terrarium" is a one-act play that explores the cyclical nature of environmental collapse and generational trauma through the lens of a suburban family swimming pool. In the first scene, a young woman named Laura and her mother celebrate their upward mobility in a new pool, only to discover that Laura’s husband, a biotech scientist named Jim, has accidentally unleashed a species of invisible, "hollow-out" leeches into the water supply that rapidly consumes them. The second scene leaps years into a post-outbreak future where the setting is identical. But, the roles have shifted: Laura is now the traumatized elder living in a pressurized space-suit. At the same time, her daughter represents a new generation that has commercialized and "sanitized" the infested world. The play concludes with a tense, fragile reconciliation as Laura finally removes her helmet to breathe the shared air with a returned, ghost-like Jim.

In "Made In America?", museum curator Andreas delivers a gripping monologue about a single brick—the last ever made in America—now an art piece by Chinese artist Terence Cao. As Andreas unpacks its history, the brick becomes a symbol of industrial decline, political irony, and personal loss, tied to Cao’s father, who died under the very bricks he produced. Blurring the lines between art, capitalism, and activism, Andreas reveals his own connections to the story and urges the audience to intervene in the artist’s espionage investigation, turning a museum tour into a call to action.

Halfway is a tragedy set in an age of advancing decay, where two sisters, Mad and Pad, struggle to survive in the household of Tin. Their fragile equilibrium shatters when Mad falls in love with Mo. Meanwhile, Tin brings home Cream, an artificial “lover” ordered to satisfy the government’s reproductive quota, whose presence exposes the family’s fears and weaknesses. Across three acts, each character confronts the impossible cost of love, survival, and the dream of escape. They are caught forever halfway between what the world demands of them and what they dare to hope for.

A family of three generations works in an isolated drive-thru, preparing meals for unseen customers, disconnected from the outside world. As they struggle to keep up with endless orders, Grandma shares memories of a distant life, blending cultural nostalgia with a longing for lost seasons. Her stories unsettle the family, especially as strange, frozen items begin to appear on the conveyor belt and the temperature plummets, trapping them in an ever-colder space. Huddling together for warmth, they confront their reality—a fragmented existence suspended between worlds. This play serves as one of many “thrus” in America, a microcosm of immigrant stories woven throughout the nation’s history.

Set in 1976 China, in the aftermath of the Tangshan earthquake and Mao Zedong’s death, An Awkward Timing follows YoYo, a rebellious 17-year-old factory apprentice with a love for poetry, and NanNan, a pragmatic 15-year-old girl torn between survival and self-discovery. As they navigate life in a refugee camp, they endure two earthquakes—one physical, as their world lies in ruins, and one ideological, as the death of Mao shakes the foundations of their beliefs.

Men Write Men Write Men Right is the story of Cai, a character of a forgotten play about China by the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, who goes on a journey to have his play produced, where he meets a Chinese playwriting student John who’s writing a play about his great grandfather. Together, they create a new play about how John’s great grandfather goes to make theater in Shanghai during the Japanese invasion, while Brecht goes to Los Angeles and tries to produce this very play. It’s a play about America, Germany, and China, in three languages, AND it’s a play about the writing of a play.

In an alternative reality of the ancient Greek and Roman antiquity, Melos the disciple of philosopher Pythagroas comes to assassinate the tyrant king of Syracuse Dionysius who is disillusioned by his family history and lost the trust to other human beings. Melos fails and is caught. Wanting to make an example out of him, Dionysius agrees to give Melos three more days to live and bid farewell to his sister Penelope, but Melos has to give up his friend Selinuntius as hostage: if he does not return in time, his friend will die for him. Meanwhile, the young disciple of Selinuntius, Philostratus, sees the opportunity to realize his ambition. It’s a clash and struggle between love, belief and doubt, cynicism, desire, ambition. It’s how everything started; the origin of the western mind. How do we live on, if no one is perfect and innocent, carrying debt and guilt?

The Triumvirates is a dark comedy set in a remote Institute during a snowstorm, where three powerful figures—Silver, Black, and Red—arrive seeking treatment for Silver. As they navigate the strange Institute, they interact with Blue, a detached receptionist, and unravel a series of bizarre and unsettling events. It's a play that explores the symptoms of "North American Autocratic Savior Complex", i.e. what is to be saved, and who is to save whom.

An American journalist then professor incidentally witnesses and shapes the destiny of a Chinese family across two generations, father and son, in the crucial moments of history.

As the sun of a new China rises, it is the last day of the Nantou catholic church, before it gets converted into an elementary school. Sister Claudia, the nun who has been taking care of Chinese abandoned orphans over the years, has to depart from her beloved children and hand them over to a young Chinese teacher, an enthusiast of Communism. It’s a conversation between two opposing ideologies over the future of a girl.

Based on historical events, in the 50s, Qian, a top nuclear scientist in America and his wife Ying a renown violinist are persecuted under Mccarthyism and deported back to the communist China, a distant home they are both familiar and enstranged. They are reunited with their childhood friends Zhang and Ping who are now high-ranking officials of the government. In this new environment, Qian wants to develope nuclear weapons for China, while Ying wants to change the profile of the national orchestra. Meanwhile, the political unrest in China is on the rise. How should history be narrated, epic or personal? Do they get to make history or history gets to make them?

Silver, Brown, Red are trapped in the Corporate, a created reality deprived of life, and the biography Silver is writing about his uncle will determine whether or not it will change.