Christine Mok - Böcker

"Some playwrights have a gift to amuse; Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig has a darker gift. Anyone with romantic notions of Chinese culture will be unsettled by the jagged, unsentimental portrait of modern urban China."(Chicago Reader) Poetic and devastating, sensuous and politically acute, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s China Plays explore the forces of global capital as they explode within the lives of everyday people in contemporary China. This volume collects together the three plays in the series, including Cowhig’s exploration of the human cost of development in China’s socialist market economy (The World of Extreme Happiness), of justice and revenge amidst ecological and economic catastrophe (Snow in Midsummer), and the tale of the trade in blood that brought the AIDS crisis to rural China (The King of Hell’s Palace). In addition to Cowhig’s plays, the volume includes a host of supplemental materials including an editorial preface and three (previously published) brief essays responding to each play by the editor, Joshua Chambers-Letson; a new introduction by theatre/performance scholar and dramaturg Christine Mok that explores the key themes in Cowhig’s body of work; a summary discussion between Cowhig, Chambers-Letson, and Mok, on Cowhig’s process and the political and aesthetic currents animating her work.The World of Extreme Happiness: "Fearless, zippily-paced, and satirical . . . Cowhig forces us down the long hard look path" (Independent) Snow in Midsummer: “Gripping and affecting… graceful and impassioned” (Times) The King of Hell's Palace: "A medical-scandal drama that we can't afford to ignore" (Telegraph)

Discover complex histories and experiences of Asian Americans through the work of 2023 Pulitzer Prize finalist Lloyd Suh.For the past decade, Lloyd Suh has dramatized forgotten moments that have indelibly shaped American history. Through a sustained exploration of over 150 years of Asian and Asian American experiences, these plays contest the pastness of the past to reveal the unexpected ways that untold histories reverberate into the present. Suh’s theatrical imagination, his stylistic and formal artistry, empathy, wit, and humor shine through unforgettable characters. Unique in scope and perspective, these history plays offer a powerful testament to the ingenuity and endurance of Asian America.The Chinese Lady is a portrait of the United States as seen through the eyes of the first Chinese woman in America, Afong Moy, who was put on display, as she comes of age in a nation struggling to define itself. Set in the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Act, The Far Country is an intimate epic that traces the forging of an unlikely family through invented biographies and poems of longing from rural Taishan to the wild west of California. A play for young audiences, Bina’s Six Apples follows Bina, whose family grows the finest apples in all of Korea, when war forces them to flee their home. With just six precious apples to her name, Bina discovers she is not the only one searching for family and a new home. In Charles Francis Chan Jr.’s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery, it is 1967 and Frank Chan and Kathy Ching are trying to stage a revolution but find themselves thrown into a metatheatrical cage match between a fledgling political identity and the malignant persistence of stereotypes and yellowface. In The HeartSellers, recent immigrants Jane, from Korea, and Luna, from the Philippines, run into each other in a grocery store on Thanksgiving in 1973. Over the course of one impulsive evening, fueled by wine and roasted sweet potatoes, they confess their fears and share their hopes for an unknowable future in the United States.In addition to these scripts, Once in the Countryside includes prefaces by theatre and performance studies scholars Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, Amy Huang, Ju Yon Kim, Christine Mok, and Elizabeth W. Son, and postscripts by theatre artists May Adrales, Jiyoun Chang, Peter Kim, Whit K. Lee, and Shannon Tyo. The collection opens with an introduction by editor Christine Mok and closes with an interview with the playwright himself. The plays, along with their context, criticism, and collaborative insight, offer an expansive view of Lloyd Suh’s vision in an inaugural collection to inspire theatre-makers and students.