Playwright Alex Lin Confronts AAPI Political Identity with Nuance

I first met playwright Alex Lin last summer over coffee to discuss her production, Laowang: A Chinatown King Lear. In this adaptation of the Shakespearean classic, Lin tells the story of Margaret Choy, an immigrant grandmother suffering from dementia, whose restaurant in Manhattan’s Chinatown is being sold to a large real estate conglomerate. It was her professional debut with Primary Stages (the company I work for) and the first time in my career as a theater administrator that I was collaborating with an artist like me: we’re around the same age, from New Jersey, and half Chinese. With Laowang, I also saw my own personal experiences reflected: my family’s presence in Chinatown has deteriorated since the passing of my great grandmother.

Between that initial meeting and the play’s November premiere, Lin and I brainstormed community programming around the play, student matinee materials, and swapped stories of our own experiences as young mixed-Asian women in the theater industry. We organized community nights with groups like Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists and Welcome To Chinatown. We also brought in other young API theater artists for a candid discussion on the industry and our places in it. Through these efforts, Lin emerged as a leader in the American Theater, earning a spot on Forbes’s 30 Under 30 list.

This month, Lin returns to Off-Broadway with Chinese Republicans at Roundabout Theater Company. The play follows four Chinese American women working at a corporate finance firm as they attend monthly affinity group lunches. When the youngest member of the group, Katie (Anna Zavelson), gets passed up for a promotion, the injustices of the workplace unravel, echoed by the experiences Ellen (Jennifer Ikeda), Iris (Jully Lee), and Phyllis (Jodi Long), the other, older women, have had over the years within the company. The Republican affiliation and conservative values of these three women play a hand in the ways they have engaged with their company and inform the advice they give Katie.

Nuanced portraits of intergenerational relationships are a throughline of Lin’s work in both Laowang and Chinese Republicans—the latter is inspired by Lin’s own experiences working in corporate America and being in relationship with more conservative members of her family. “Most of the women in my family are very conservative, the majority of whom also worked in [the] corporate [world],” said Lin. “I firmly believe that our lived experiences influence the way that we view the world and also influence the way that we engage with politics.” I also saw myself in Katie, having my own layered relationships with other women of color in my life who have been mentors and former co-workers.

Chinese Republicans also marks a special collaboration between Lin and director Chay Yew. I first became familiar with Yew during his time as Artistic Director of Chicago’s Victory Gardens during my college years at DePaul University. Seeing an Asian theater artist at the helm of an institution I admired so deeply drove me toward a career in arts leadership. As a longtime champion of emerging API voices in theater, Yew was also one of the first people to really believe in Lin’s writing. “I’ve learned so much from Chay, not only about the play, but also about myself as a person, artist, and writer,” said Lin.