I have spent my entire life living in the hyphen.

 

Born in Singapore, immigrant to America, and a queer artist navigating

institutions that were not built with me in mind, I know what it feels like to stand at the threshold and wonder whether you are allowed inside. But over time, I have come to understand that living in the in-between is not a disadvantage. It is an education and a gift. It is, in fact, the very thing that made me an artist.

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Theatre, for me, has never been simply a place where stories are told. It is a place where the stories that have been suppressed, distorted, or simply never spoken get to finally take up space. That is not a supplementary function of the art form. That is its most essential one.

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At the center of everything I do, as both playwright and director, is a passionate commitment to elevating marginalized voices. Not out of obligation, and not as a corrective gesture, but because I genuinely believe those voices are indispensable to understanding what America actually is. My own plays have always pursued what I think of as "universal particularity": the idea that the more specific and culturally precise a story is, the more deeply it connects. I do not soften cultural specificity for the sake of broader appeal. I trust that authenticity is what creates real resonance. When you tell a story with total honesty, you do not narrow your audience. You expand it.

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I also have no patience for stereotypes, or for the kind of artistic complacency that mistakes familiarity for truth. Reinforcing cultural clichés is not just aesthetically lazy. It is a form of colonialism and self-erasure, and I refuse it. I am interested in the complicated, the contradictory, the aspects of identity and history that resist easy resolution. If theatre is going to matter, it has to be willing to unsettle. It has to ask hard questions about power, justice, and belonging without rushing to reassure. Art should provoke. It should disturb. And in doing so, it should also liberate. It should give people the radical experience of feeling seen.

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As a director of new plays, I think of myself as a steward of living writers. Over the years I have had the privilege of directing world premieres by José Rivera, Lucas Hnath, Naomi Iizuka, Julia Cho, Luis Alfaro, Marcus Gardley, Lauren Yee, and David Henry Hwang, artists whose work fundamentally expands what American theatre can look like and who it speaks to. I also founded and led the Mark Taper Forum's Asian Theatre Workshop for a decade, at a time when Asian American voices had almost no institutional home in this country. That experience taught me something I have never forgotten: championing new plays is not simply a programming decision. It is an act of canon-building. It is a declaration about whose lives are worth dramatizing.

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That belief deepened during my years leading Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago. When I arrived, I was one of only a handful of artistic directors of color in the American theatre. I knew the opportunity was not just to program differently, but to restructure the institution itself. I brought in writers like Ike Holter, Marcus Gardley, Luis Alfaro, Samuel D. Hunter, and Tanya Saracho, not simply to diversify the season, but to transform the DNA of the ensemble. I created the Directors Inclusion Initiative to develop emerging Chicago directors who identify as people of color, disabled, women, transgender, gender-nonconforming, or LGBTQ. I launched the Next Generation Fellowship to invest in the arts leaders of color who would eventually run these institutions themselves. Because I have always believed this: instead of waiting to be invited to sit at the table, we must break the table and build a new one. Inclusion is not the act of adding diverse voices into existing frameworks. It is the harder, more necessary work of reimagining those frameworks entirely.

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Central to my artistic philosophy is what I call a dramaturgy of audiences. I do not experience theatre as a one-way act of expression, a finished object delivered to passive spectators. I experience it as a dialogue, a civic exchange in which ideas are shared, challenged, and collectively rethought. My productions ask audiences to engage with questions of American identity, social justice, and global citizenship not from a comfortable distance, but as active participants in something unresolved. At Victory Gardens, this took concrete form in the Chicago Play Cycle, through which eight new plays reflecting the city's richly diverse communities were produced, and in the annual Ignition Festival of New Plays, which sent new work rippling outward to stages across the country. The theatre, I believe, belongs to the city around it. Our job is to keep earning that relationship.

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And then there is the question of the next generation, which I think about constantly. When I left Victory Gardens, I was deliberate about handing over a theatre in the black, financially stable and ready for the next leader to take real risks, because I know from my own experience how much it matters to be given that kind of space. I arrived as an outsider. I was treated as one, sometimes openly, sometimes through the quieter mechanisms of institutional resistance. But I also had people who opened doors for me, who believed in the work before the work had proven itself. David Henry Hwang is one of those people. The debt I owe him is not one I can repay directly. I can only repay it forward.

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My experience of being the perpetual outsider, in Singapore, in America, in the American theatre, has shaped everything about how I make work and how I lead. Difference is not something to overcome or apologize for. It is a source of creative strength, a particular way of seeing that produces a particular kind of clarity.

 

Through my work as playwright, director, and artistic leader, I am trying to build a theatre that does not just reflect the society we have, but actively participates in shaping the society we need. A theatre that is dynamic, inclusive, and unafraid. A theatre that belongs, finally and fully, to everyone.