Once in the Countryside : A Collection of Plays

Discover the work of 2023 Pulitzer Prize finalist Lloyd Suh, whose work contests the pastness of the past, revealing the unexpected ways that history reverberates across the present to shape the future.

Through his plays, Lloyd Suh has been documenting 150 years of Asian and Asian American experiences, exploring forgotten and ignored pivotal moments in Asian American history. His plays draw on a variety of forms and aesthetics to re-tell, re-discover, and re-invent the past. Unique in scope and perspective, these history plays offer a powerful metaphor for the ingenuity and endurance of Asian American communities.

Alongside these five plays – The Chinese Lady, The Far Country, Bina’s Six Apples, Charles Francis Chan Jr.''s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery, and The Heart Sellers – this edition is rich with additional resources. Not only is each play accompanied by a preface by a theatre scholar and a postscript by a creative collaborator, but the collection opens with an introduction by editor Christine Mok and closes with a conversation with playwright himself.

Taken together, the plays, along with their context, criticism, and collaborative insight, offer an expansive view of Suh’s vision in an inaugural collection to inspire theatre makers, actors, and students alike.

Discover complex histories and experiences of Asian Americans through the work of 2023 Pulitzer Prize finalist Lloyd Suh.

For the past decade, Lloyd Suh has dramatized forgotten moments that have indelibly shaped American history. Through a sustained exploration of over 150 years of Asian and Asian American experiences, these plays contest the pastness of the past to reveal the unexpected ways that untold histories reverberate into the present. Suh’s theatrical imagination, his stylistic and formal artistry, empathy, wit, and humor shine through unforgettable characters. Unique in scope and perspective, these history plays offer a powerful testament to the ingenuity and endurance of Asian America.

The Chinese Lady is a portrait of the United States as seen through the eyes of the first Chinese woman in America, Afong Moy, who was put on display, as she comes of age in a nation struggling to define itself. Set in the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Act, The Far Country is an intimate epic that traces the forging of an unlikely family through invented biographies and poems of longing from rural Taishan to the wild west of California. A play for young audiences, Bina’s Six Apples follows Bina, whose family grows the finest apples in all of Korea, when war forces them to flee their home. With just six precious apples to her name, Bina discovers she is not the only one searching for family and a new home. In Charles Francis Chan Jr.’s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery, it is 1967 and Frank Chan and Kathy Ching are trying to stage a revolution but find themselves thrown into a metatheatrical cage match between a fledgling political identity and the malignant persistence of stereotypes and yellowface. In The Heart
Sellers, recent immigrants Jane, from Korea, and Luna, from the Philippines, run into each other in a grocery store on Thanksgiving in 1973. Over the course of one impulsive evening, fueled by wine and roasted sweet potatoes, they confess their fears and share their hopes for an unknowable future in the United States.

In addition to these scripts, Once in the Countryside includes prefaces by theatre and performance studies scholars Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, Amy Huang, Ju Yon Kim, Christine Mok, and Elizabeth W. Son, and postscripts by theatre artists May Adrales, Jiyoun Chang, Peter Kim, Whit K. Lee, and Shannon Tyo. The collection opens with an introduction by editor Christine Mok and closes with an interview with the playwright himself. The plays, along with their context, criticism, and collaborative insight, offer an expansive view of Lloyd Suh’s vision in an inaugural collection to inspire theatre-makers and students.