Due to the recent increase in COVID-19 numbers and for the safety of the community, this weekend’s performance has been cancelled.
We are making this decision with the community’s best interest in mind– we want to prioritize the safety of the Chinatown and local AAPI community as well as our actors and creative team.
We are in the process of discussing the future of Chosen Family. We are invested in Jessica and Cara’s work and hope to stage a reading in the future. We hope to see you at a future “Found in Translation” event.
Chuang Stage, Asian American Theatre Artists of Boston (AATAB), and Pao Arts Center unite for “Found in Translation,” a play reading and community workshop series that amplifies the power and complexities of being multilingual, immigrants, or identifying as AAPI in Greater Boston.
The first play in this series - Chosen Family weaves together the Vietnamese-American diaspora with Buddhist reincarnation theory. The theory in question for this story is one that claims a person’s soul enters a “void” after passing on. Once in that void, the soul gets to decide if they’d like to live again. In this lies the piece’s Dramatic Question: if you knew everything you know now, would you do it all over again?
Here to answer that question are four “students" and pillars of the Viet-Am experience. Due to not confronting "khổ " ("suffering") during their lifetimes, the four find themselves reuniting in a perpetual place of learning…their old Vietnamese language school.
Age advisory: Appropriate for all ages
Language: English and Vietnamese
Event is free, suggested donation $10.
Performance Time: Friday, Dec 17, 2021 7:00 PM & Saturday Dec 18, 2021 7:00 PM
About Artists:
Jessica Luu Pelletier - Playwright
Jessica Luu Pelletier (she/her) is a New York-based queer biracial Vietnamese-American theatre artist, writer, and actor. She received her BFA in Drama from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Born in Hà Nội, Việt Nam and raised in Massachusetts and Guam, Jessica has always identified as a third culture kid and as part of Generation 1.5. Seeking to understand this place in the diaspora, she writes multi-cultural stories that aim to represent her communities, connect generations, and liberate those who have been Othered. Jessica has worked with the Sống Collective as an inaugural member of their Việt Writers' Lab.
Cara Hinh (she/they) is a queer, fat & mixed Viet American director and educator originally from Indiana. As the daughter of a refugee, they are drawn to work about and for people of the diaspora that expands the ideas of American identity. She rejoices in work that speaks to the complicated and messy intersectionalities of holding a multiplicity of cultures and identities. Cara is a 2021-22 Drama League Hangar Fellow and a proud member of the Roundabout Directors Group.
About Partners:
CHUANG Stage is the Mandarin-English bilingual, bicultural theater company in Boston, MA that cultivates boundary-breaking stories that bridge the world.
Asian American Theatre Artists of Boston is a social collective that empowers and connects Pan-Asian theatre artists in the Greater Boston area.
About Sponsor:
“This project is made possible by a Live Arts Boston grant from the Boston Foundation.”
Contact: Ashley Yung, 617-863-9080