What I'm doing right now

Last updated: October 11, 2026 from the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, CT

It is a rainy Sunday in Connecticut at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, one of my favorite places on Earth. I'm once again teaching playwriting at National Theater Institute, and it's a joy to be around passionate artists working so diligently.

Back in New York, the Ma-Yi Writers Lab is starting up again, and I'm excited to be part of its Playground cohort, where I get to bring in pages and immediately put work up. It's so much fun to write new pages up until a few hours before, and then that evening workshop it with actors. I'm currently working on a new play about Shen Yun.

Outside of Ma-Yi, I am still working on Made in Chinatown, my play about mother relationships and the labor struggle of Chinese women in garment sweatshops in 1987 New York.

While I believe in my work, and I'm so honored to have many others who support my plays, it does not change the fact that theater is going through a tough time right now. My friends and colleagues are feeling increasingly bleak at the prospect of making new work in theater. In my playwriting class at NTI, I always begin the first class asking what the students are interested in learning; and for the first time in any of my classes, the students' questions all concerned the industry and business. Not a single question about the artistry. This is not to say my students are obsessed with the business side of art. Rather, I believe it's a marker of how dire the theater landscape is right now. While students will always care about how to produce their work, it is something else to hear only that.

When thinking about the state of theater in America right now, one of my favorite Chinese terms is helpful: involution (内卷). The first character, nei 内, means inside, and the second character, juan 卷, means roll. Together, it conjures the image of an industry circling in on itself. The way I translate involution is: to describe a state of the industry where the rewards are getting smaller and fewer, and the competition is only growing larger and fiercer.

It's easy to feel disillusioned during times like this, but I always have to remind myself that there is always a need for art, and no matter what, there will still be artists out there undeterred in creating new work. I can only aspire to be one of them for as long as I can.

Besides theater, I am increasingly concerned about the rise of AI. I've always been against AI in art, but the Hugging Face incident has now made my concern more pressing as the popular discourse has begun to sound the alarms on an existential threat. I've been considering my own relation to it as an artist. Please reach out to me if you are an artist similarly concerned about AI developing out of human control. To learn more, I recommend you start here.