Once in the Countryside: A Collection of Plays - Hardcover

by Lloyd Suh (Author), Christine Mok (Editor)

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 Heart
Sellers, 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.

Author Biography

Lloyd Suh is the author of plays including The Heart Sellers, The Chinese Lady, The Far Country (Pulitzer Prize finalist), Bina's Six Apples, Charles Francis Chan Jr.'s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery, Franklinland, American Hwangap, and others, which have been produced at the Atlantic Theater Company, Public Theater, Alliance Theatre, Huntington Theater, Milwaukee Rep, Denver Center, Magic Theatre, Berkeley Rep, Children's Theatre Company, Ma-Yi Theatre Company, and the National Asian American Theatre Company among others, including internationally at the Cultural Center of the Philippines and with PCPA at the Guerilla Theatre in Seoul, Korea. Awards include the Steinberg Playwright Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, Herb Alpert Award, Horton Foote Prize, and Helen Merrill Award. He served as Director of Artistic Programs at The Lark from 2011-20. A resident playwright at New Dramatists and a Lifetime Member of the Actors Studio and Ensemble Studio Theatre, he was elected in 2016 to the Dramatists Guild Council and serves as a Professor of the Practice at Princeton University.

Christine Mok is Associate Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island, USA. Her work has been published in the Journal of Asian American Studies, Theatre Survey, Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. She is co-editor with Joshua Chambers-Letson of Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig's China Trilogy: Three Parables of Global Capital (Methuen Drama, 2022).