Lloyd Suh – författare

Drama / 3m, 2f Steeped in the difficulty of reunification and reconciliation, American Hwangap tells the story of Min Suk Chun, who some 15 years earlier left his family in a West Texas suburb to return to his native Korea. On the occasion of his 60th birthday (hwangap), a milestone signifying the completion of the Eastern Zodiac and a type of rebirth, he returns to his ex-wife and now adult children as they struggle to reconcile their broken past with the mercurial, verbose and often exasperating patriarch now back at the head of the table. Through a tense birthday weekend filled with humor, heartbreak and half-filled expectations, this American hwangap and its aftermath bears a family not quite whole but still somehow transformed, and not quite happy but still somehow beautiful. "A delight to watch." - The New York Times "Touching family drama." - Variety "As refreshingly original in its point of view as in its quirky humor and affecting relationships." - San Francisco Gate

Playwright Lloyd Suh reimagines the political intrigue and high drama of Henry V for twenty-first-century audiences. Shakespeare’s Henry V is a play about nationalism, war, and how we remember history. Known for its rousing speeches and miraculous outcomes, the play has long had a life beyond the stage and page, its themes and rhetoric common points of reference in politics. In this modern translation of Henry V, Lloyd Suh has created a new interpretation that is distinctly his own while protecting the mystery of Shakespeare’s drama. Suh’s translation focuses on the actors and the staging, channeling the theatrical nature of Shakespeare’s play for a new audience.  This translation of Henry V was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present the Bard’s work in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. Enlisting the talents of a diverse group of contemporary playwrights, screenwriters, and dramaturges from diverse backgrounds, this project reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era.

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.