Once in the Countryside: A Collection of Plays (Methuen Drama Play Collections). This item is unavailable.Once in the Countryside: A Collection of Plays (Methuen Drama Play Collections)

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.

Lloyd Suh is the author of The Chinese Lady, Charles Francis Chan Jr.'s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery, American Hwangap, The Wong Kids in the Secret of the Space Chupacabra Go!, Jesus in India, and others, produced with Ma-Yi, Magic Theatre, EST, NAATCO, PlayCo, Denver Center, Milwaukee Rep, ArtsEmerson, Children's Theatre Co, and more, including internationally at the Cultural Center of the Philippines and with PCPA in Seoul, Korea. He has received support from the NEA Arena Stage New Play Development program, Mellon Foundation, NYFA, NYSCA, Jerome, TCG, Dramatists Guild, and residencies including NYS&F and Ojai. He is an alum of Youngblood and the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, and was a recipient of a 2016 Helen Merrill Award and the 2019 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. From 2005-2010 he served as Artistic Director of Second Generation and Co-Director of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, and has served since 2011 as the Director of Artistic Programs at The Lark, and since 2015 as a member of the Dramatists Guild Council.

Christine Mok is Associate Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island, USA.