Diana Ly

Twelve years after the forced evacuation of the planet, the mayor of a city-spaceship commissions a play about Earth. Led by a cynical ex-theatremaker determined to avoid sentimentality, a ragtag group cull through their fading memories to figure out what they want to say about their lost home while they each reckon with their mortality. Their budding community and newfound sense of stability are challenged when they discover they might be on this ship for much longer than they’d planned for.

Hrotsvit, the first known western female playwright, was a secular canoness in 10th Century Saxony who lived in Gandersheim Abbey. Far from being cloistered environments dedicated exclusively to religious pursuit, these abbeys were fertile communities for the education and socialization of well-to-do women and girls, some of whom were destined for marriage, as they grappled with their place in a broader society that saw them merely as tokens for transactional unions. Likely, these were the only places that smart, modern women could be themselves. But that doesn’t mean they were free.

Remember when Adele Lim was offered one-tenth of her white male co-writer’s fee to work on the sequel to Crazy Rich Asians? Or when Anna May Wong was passed over for the lead of The Good Earth in favor of a white actress in yellowface? A kaleidoscopic trip down entertainment’s memory lane as one Asian female screenwriter wonders why she’s even trying to make it in Hollywood.

The Persians is a three-act play, written in the style of a trilogy of Greek tragedies, that adapts extant ancient Greek plays in order to reclaim the narrative of the ancient Achaemenid Persians. Each part retells a violent episode in the Persian Royal family, but recenters the action on the women, and recontextualizes their behavior as powerful, motivated, and always in service of their vision for the Empire.

Petty Sacrifices follows Steph’s extended stay at her sister Florence’s home, ostensibly to help take care of their parents and her nephew during an unnamed pandemic. Scenes unfold out of chronological order, as we watch the progression of the virus and the toxic relationships in the house: between Steph and her mom, between Florence and her husband Thanh, and between the sisters. The altar tells us who’s dead, and therefore, who’s still alive. Will Steph be able to save herself before it's too late?

Over several weeks of grueling rehearsals under the merciless direction of their drama teacher, the six Vietnamese-American high school actors cast in Our Country’s Good start seeing more of themselves in their characters, making the connection between their family’s boat trips to America and the penal colony’s arrival to Australia, and blurring the lines between their own trauma and the events of the play. Over the course of the play, they’ll grapple with their identities, their sense of self-worth, their ingrained ideas of success, and ultimately, their right to be artists.