Eugenie Chan

Eugenie Chan

Eugenie Chan is a San Francisco-based playwright. Theater/Opera: Cutting Ball Theater, San Francisco Mime Troupe, Magic Theater, Public Theater, Playwrights Horizons, Houston Grand Opera: HGOco and other companies. Film: Berlin International, Mill Valley, Big Apple, Cinestory, DisOrient, San Diego Asian Film Festivals. Alumna: New Dramatists, Playwrights Foundation. Playwright Emerita, Cutting Ball. Member,...
Eugenie Chan is a San Francisco-based playwright. Theater/Opera: Cutting Ball Theater, San Francisco Mime Troupe, Magic Theater, Public Theater, Playwrights Horizons, Houston Grand Opera: HGOco and other companies. Film: Berlin International, Mill Valley, Big Apple, Cinestory, DisOrient, San Diego Asian Film Festivals. Alumna: New Dramatists, Playwrights Foundation. Playwright Emerita, Cutting Ball. Member, 6NewPlays, a Bay Area playwriting & producing collective. Eugenie teaches at the University of San Francisco’s Performing Arts & Social Justice Department. Eugenie Chan Theater Projects is part of Intersection for the Arts’ Accelerator. Up next: 19 Wentworth Alley, Chinatown, Z Below, Summer 2015. www.6newplays.com

Plays

  • NOVELL-AAH!
    Set in the high drama of the telenovela, blonde Chinese diva Marlene, puts her tuxedoed daughter, Izzy, through the paces of courtship. Izzy loves Carlos. But Marlene loves Carlos too. More important, will Carlos ever come? Only Olga the maid knows. A dizzying vortex of gender, culture, and mother-daughter competition.
  • EMIL, A CHINESE PLAY
    A young South American journeys through the United States, into the heart of Chinatown, and lands in the arms of Mother, the quintessential Chinese uber-mom, who will do anything, anything at all, to find her spinster daughter a man. A sweet comedy about lonely hearts and the American dream.
  • SNAKEWOMAN
    A mythic tale of a three-breasted, three-armed, Asian goddess—half-woman, half snake. Now an angry single mother of three teen princesses—one Black, one White, and one Lemon Yellow, she must contend with their man-crazy desires. Sadly, her zeal leads to tragedy. A fairy tale about transforming woman’s fury into mother’s blessing.
  • RANCHO GRANDE
    The desert southwest. A single smoking campfire. Above, two Chinese gods, Oxboy and Moon Lady, fly in the night sky. Below, young Mamie dreams of having a baby. But with no one to turn to except her oddball pioneer family and the flighty gods, what’s a Chinese American cowgirl to do? A Chinese American Western, complete with wordplay, stunning visuals, the iconography of the West, and gunshots.
  • DAPHNE DOES DIM SUM
    Watch Daphne and Bessie, two seventy-something Chinese American ladies-who-lunch, duke it out for the pride of paying the bill at their weekly gossipfests—until a man comes between them. A hilarious comedy about old pals and new enemies—boxing match and sight gags included.
  • BONE TO PICK
    A postmodern adaptation of the myth of Ariadne: Prince Theseus promises to marry Ariadne if she helps him through the labyrinth to kill her half-brother, the Minotaur. Mission accomplished, he abandons her on a desert island, where for the last 3000 years, she’s been waiting tables in a diner at the end of a battle-worn world. What is the price of love and war?
  • MADAME HO
    Madame Ho, a full-length drama, tells the story of a formidable woman in the Barbary Coast — a real-life 19th-century brothel madam, Chinese immigrant, wife, mother, and this playwright’s great-grandmother. Madame Ho explores the epic history of the Chinese American West through a shape-shifting tale of one woman's struggle to forge a life for herself and her daughter – a story about survival and complicity.
  • KITCHEN TABLE
    An Asian American coming-out play. Nicky Wong is a young straight American guy. Living at home, he's taken a year off from college to find himself. Really, all he wants is to fix up his Corvette. Max Schmidt is the mechanic who will him. When their relationship turns hot & heavy, Nicky has no idea what to do with his new found sexuality and its seductive violence. Worse yet, when Nicky shows up late...
    An Asian American coming-out play. Nicky Wong is a young straight American guy. Living at home, he's taken a year off from college to find himself. Really, all he wants is to fix up his Corvette. Max Schmidt is the mechanic who will him. When their relationship turns hot & heavy, Nicky has no idea what to do with his new found sexuality and its seductive violence. Worse yet, when Nicky shows up late for dinner, beaten and covering up a swastika cut on his chest, father Alex carries on as if nothing has happened. So begins Nicky's st to carve out his version of Chinese American manhood.