EALC Graduate Student Yiwen Wu Is Dramaturg for the Chicago Premier of Timeline Theater's the Chinese Lady

Published on May 12, 2022 

This month and next, TimeLine Theatre closes its 25th anniversary season with the Chicago premiere of Lloyd Suh’s The Chinese Lady (2018), directed by Helen Young, with Mi Kang in the role of Afong Moy and Glenn Obrero as her translator, Atung. Slated for production since a TimeLine reading of the play in January 2020, the story of the first documented Chinese woman in America has become painfully legible after two years of pandemic-exacerbated xenophobia, nationwide reflection on past and present racial inequities, and ongoing anti-Asian violence.  As rehearsals were gearing up for The Chinese Lady, dramaturg and graduate student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Yiwen Wu, posed a few questions to New York-based playwright Lloyd Suh about the reverence he has for Afong Moy, the value of interrogating social constructs, and how he thinks about his connections with a broader cultural conversation.

Read more about the play by clicking here.

Read Yiwen's interview with Lloyd Suh by clicking here.

Yiwen's research focuses on Chinese opera and the history of performance. She is particularly drawn to the transitional period from the imperial nineteenth century through the iconoclastic twentieth century because of its revolutionary nature and proliferation of theatrical entertainment. Her MA thesis, “Actor, Character, and Theater: An Adaptation of Macbeth in Chinese Opera,” is a case study of Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene in a 1986 kun opera production.