Animation from Act 2, Scene 5 from Seamless.

Special thanks to Ilani Umel for animating this video.


SEAMLESS Workshop Production at Morgan Wixson’s New Works Festival


Seamless

SEAMLESS stages a theatrical view of history and identity, refracted through gender, work, family, and generation. Switching from comedic to poignant in a beat, the play centers on Diane Kubota, a successful Japanese American corporate attorney, whose life is seamlessly perfect - on the surface. When Dr. Kathleen Goto, a Harvard psychologist, interviews Diane about her parents' internment during WWII, the questions launch Diane on a quest that compels her to ask how well she knows herself, her family, her culture. A play about history and memory, the afterlife of trauma, and the (im)possibility of knowing the people you love most.

Readings:

Lark Theater in three different versions, directed by Victor Maog (Professor of Performing Arts at the Savannah College of Art and Design), Eric Ting (Director of Soho Rep), and Ralph Peña (Producing Artistic Director at the Ma-Yi Theatre).

New York Theatre Workshop. Liz Diamond, Yale School of Drama, director. Cast included Jodi Long, from Broadway’s Flower Drum Song.

Awards:

2nd place, 2014 Jane Chambers Award

Honorable Mention, See Change Festival, East West Players

Testimonials:

Luis Alfaro:

https://www.facebook.com/theluisalfaro/posts/10157132040156235

Plays

But Can He Dance?

BUT CAN HE DANCE? is a multiracial relationship comedy.

Production:

Asian American Repertory Theatre, San Diego, October 25-November 13, 2003

Reading:

Moving Arts Theater Company, Los Angeles Theater Center, April 2001.

(Dis)graceful(l) Conduct

(DIS)GRACEFUL(L) CONDUCT is a satire of the“atmospheric violence”of gender and racial harassment at Harvard. This “high disco revenge comedy” features an Asian American woman professor who, fed up with the recurring harassment she receives from her white, male colleagues, bands together with a multiracial group of women to reduce “Ivy University” to rubble. It won Mixed Blood Theater’s “We Don’t Need No Stinking Dramas” national comedy playwriting award.

Readings:

East West Players

Powerhouse Theater

Women Artists’ Group

Moving Arts Theater

Playwrights’ Theatre of New Jersey

Plays in Progress

Surviving the S**tshow

Veering from realism to absurdism and masque to kabuki, the semi-autobiographical play centers on a Japanese American professor wrestling with art, academia, and anti-Asian violence during the pandemic. Kondo asks larger questions about what kinds of interventions we can make as scholar-artists.

Reading:

Association for Theatre in Higher Education 2022 Conference, plenary event. Directed by actress, writer, scholar, activist Dr. Nicole Hodges Persley, Professor of American Studies and African & African American Studies; Vice Provost for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging at the University of Kansas; Artistic Director of the KC Melting Pot Theatre.