2023-2024 Season
Main Stage Productions @ Boston Center for the Arts
As a resident company at the Boston Center for the Arts in the heart of South End, CHUANG Stage us an artistic home for pan-Asian theatremakers in Greater Boston. Our dynamic productions engage audiences in Boston Chinatown and underserved Asian immigrant neighborhoods through impactful community engagement. We are nationally recognized for curating Asian American new plays and performances that advance the translingual aesthetic.
Our annual two-show season at the Boston Center for the Arts feature a "Pay-As-You-Are with $0 Minimum" tiered pricing model. This model ensures theatre accessibility for working-class immigrants of Asian American descent, a group underrepresented among arts and culture patrons in Boston.
Nuwa in Fairyland
Written by Brandon Zang
Directed by Carla Mirabal Rodríguez
After getting cast as Puck in his high school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Benji dives deep into method acting to prepare for his role. In the enchanted forest of foggy adolescence, he runs into a stranger: the Chinese creator goddess Nüwa (女娲).
Does she hold the key to his birthplace as a transracial adoptee? Or will Benji never escape Fairyland? Conceived by Chinese Canadian playwright Brandon Zang, Nüwa in Fairyland fuses Shakespeare's charm with Chinese folklore into a coming-of-age tale.
The Fortune Teller
Written by Christina R. Chan
Directed by Kai Chao
Can you predict your destiny? How do we end up where we are?
Inspired by an unsettling history, THE FORTUNE TELLER traces several generations of a family from China in the 1800’s to present-day America, as they search for destiny and each other bound together by immigrant legacy and bloodline.
Found in Translation @ Pao Arts Center
“Found in Translation” is our annual summer public art collaboration with Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center/Pao Arts Center and the social collective Asian American Theatre Artists of Boston (AATAB). This initiative transforms the cultural experiences and artistic accessibility of Boston Chinatown by bringing joyful theatrical experiences to its doorsteps. Since 2021, “Found in Translation” has activated community spaces with six staged readings by playwrights of the Asian Diaspora. These bilingual theatre works focus on gathering and uplifting specific cultural communities, welcoming over 2000 audience members and engaging over 100 local and national API artists.
SKINLESS
A Workshop Staged Reading
By liqing xu
Directed by Tianding He
SKINLESS reimagines the ancient Chinese legend The White Snake as a queer, gender-bending modern fairy tale.
Two snake demons, White and Green, come to Earth to experience being human. White transforms into a human and immediately falls passionately in love, but Green cannot successfully become human. Instead, Green’s soul gets separated from their body, and they are cursed to inhabit different human and non-human bodies. In each new form that Green takes, they chase both White and the recognition of their own carnal desire. Green’s feelings for White become blurred through these experiments with embodiment, and Green gets closer to their true self, which is a self that perhaps does not align with any particular body at all.
