2023-24 Season Artistic Statement
AATP Presents: Hold/Release
"Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?"
Mary Oliver, “Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches”
Sometimes liberation isn’t about fixing things. Sometimes (or more than sometimes) our institutions betray us. Sometimes a situation is fundamentally shitty and irreparable. Sometimes it’s about living in that feeling. And then what? Sometimes it’s about making it work, about how we breathe and go on, about how we still laugh anyways.
This season, we aim to explore how we make do in an unjust world through two dramatic comedies. (Or maybe they’re comedic dramas? You can decide where the balance between grief, rage, and humor is). Both are based on true stories. In our fall show, 410[GONE] by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, a sister relives her younger brother’s suicide and tries to find reason in tragedy, while in the Chinese Land of the Dead, the Goddess of Mercy and the Monkey King facilitate transmigration through Dance Dance Revolution. What does it mean to love him if it will always hurt her? How do you heal? Man of God by Anna Moench takes the stage in the spring. In this Asian feminist rage play, a group of Korean church girls on a mission trip finds out their pastor has put a camera in their bathroom. Each girl processes her emotions in her own way, navigating initial reactions, revenge fantasies, and, ultimately, what they are able to do at all with the systems of power in place.
Neither of our plays end in an upheaval of the circumstances that created these traumas, but by no means is this to say we cannot fight these systems. We must. And we must recognize how this fight exists on an everyday scale. We reject the notion that trauma exists somehow separate from everyday life, that processing it is some sort of rarified internal work. It is integrated into our laughter, relationships, and communities; it is tied to our immense capacity to support each other through every moment.
Our annual New Works Festival returns this winter, featuring staged readings of new student plays. In the interest of increasing accessibility and diversity, we will also be producing a new developmental stage series. We hope this programming will help close the gap between NWF and our mainstage productions by making a space to: 1) further develop new work, 2) encourage lower-stakes theatrical involvement, 3) center diverse and underrepresented voices, and 4) make smaller theatrical projects.
We cannot forget to hold each other. We cannot forget to laugh. We cannot forget to breathe.
With love,
The Asian American Theater Project