Ma-Yi Theater Company Announces Three Premieres for Its 2024-25 Season

The award-winning Ma-Yi Theater Company, whose primary mission is to develop and produce new and innovative plays by Asian American writers, announced its 2024-2025 season, which features three premieres presented in partnership with theaters across the country.

The season begins in Minneapolis with the Children’s Theatre world premiere production of Drawing Lessons by Michi Barall (Peer Gynt and The Norwegian Hapa Band), running October 8-November 10. Co-commissioned by Ma-Yi Theater Company and Children’s Theatre Company and directed by Jack Tamburri, Drawing Lessons takes place on both the stage and the screen as drawings show Kate’s manhwa graphic novel coming together, even as she deals with school, friends, and how her Korean heritage fits into her American lifestyle.

Following the success of Mike Lew’s Teenage Dick in 2018 and Lloyd Suh’s The Chinese Lady in 2022, Ma-Yi Theater Company returns to the Public Theater in the winter with the New York premiere of SUMO by Lisa Sanaye Dring (Kairos), Ma-Yi’s 2024 Tow Playwright in Residence. A co-production of Ma-Yi Theater Company and La Jolla Playhouse and directed by Obie winner Ralph B. Peña, SUMO is set in the rarely explored world of an elite sumo training facility in Tokyo where six men practice, eat, love, play, and ultimately fight.

In a co-production with the Bushwick Starr and HERE, Ma-Yi Theater Company will present RHEOLOGY, the newest work by Obie Award-winning writer and director Shayok Misha Chowdhury, a 2024 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for his play Public Obscenities. Running April 22-May 17 at the Bushwick Starr, RHEOLOGY is a performance memoir created and performed with his mother, the physicist Bulbul Chakraborty, whose specialty is the science of rheology, the laws governing the malleability and movement of matter under force. Together, they try to understand the science and perform the story of how things flow.

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