This June, five Asian American playwrights will have their work showcased in a festival produced by Pork Filled Productions:  Unleashed:  New Plays for a New World.  The plays’ themes range from technology, to love, to racism, and each play will receive a staged reading at Theatre Off Jackson.   

This is the fourth year of the Unleashed festival, and the plays presented reflect some changes. “Previously, the three other years were overseen by founders of the program, which included me,” said Roger Tang, PFP’s Executive Director.  “With a new group of producers who entered the group a couple of years back, it was appropriate for them to put their own stamp on PFP’s script development process.” 

Tang reports that PFP limited submissions to the first fifty plays sent in, and of those, five plays were chosen to be presented.  Two are written by Seattle playwrights:  BLOOD/SUCKER by Anamaria Guerzon and C[Y]PHER by Harold Taw.  The three other plays are Hail/Mary Maria by Chicago playwright RJ Silva, Eggshell; or Vỏ Trứng by San Francisco playwright Anthony Doan, and The Machine by New York City playwright Magpie Park.  

BLOOD/SUCKER is billed as a thriller that is centered on the school system.  “When I was first out of college in 2021, I worked as a Paraeducator at a public high school for a year,” Guerzon recounted.  “I was deeply moved by what I saw, an up-close portrait of schools today.”  

In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, Guerzon witnessed students whose nutritional and emotional needs were met primarily at school, rather than at home.  “I saw the teachers try their best to be not just teachers, but social workers, doctors, babysitters, parental substitutes, and more,” she said.  “So many of them were kind and good and genuinely wanted to help, but the system was set up to burn them out.”  

Issues of race and ethnicity also flared.  “The Black Lives Matter movement and conversations about race were at the forefront of everyone’s minds,” Guerzon explained. “At the same time, the ‘Critical Race Theory’ debate was raging on conservative news channels, and ‘CRT’ was used to ban history of marginalized people, in an attempt to control the narrative of American history, and erase this country’s past atrocities.”  

All this gave Guerzon a lot of material to work with.  “I added in some vampires,” she said, “and wrote all that angst, hope, and grief into BLOOD/SUCKER.”  

Last October, Guerzon’s play was presented by Copious Love Productions at the Jules Maes Saloon.  “They had actually accepted me on the basis of a different play of mine, SKIN,” she recalled.  “Thanks to their flexibility, and commitment to the artist as a whole, I was able to take BLOOD/SUCKER, create a new draft, and hear it at Jules Mae.”  

During that presentation, Guerzon learned that the pacing of the play needed improvement.  “I had originally intended it to be a comedy-horror, but I realized that I was really more excited about a horror with moments of reprieve,” she described. “Once I sped up time, I also upped the violence, and dove further into the horror genre.”  

Guerzon is looking forward to gauging the audience reactions to the new version.  “There is also a doubling aspect of this show, where actors play both the children and the adults,” she said. “I’m hoping to use this development period as an incubator, to see if that doubling works, since I have yet to fully crack that aspect.”  

Meanwhile, playwright Taw will present a work in which a fourth-grade teacher named Zara Chadha uses her memories to try to gain access to her deceased father’s digital copy of his mind.  “C[Y]PHER originated from the intersections of capitalism, the historical search for the fountain of youth, and the expanding ability of artificial intelligence to mimic consciousness,” he elaborated. “C[Y]PHER combines themes of digital immortality, suicide, and AI because I wanted the story to be about how human desires shape our world.”  

Taw centers this mystery around an array of questions.  “If we could ‘fix’ depression, our failing bodies, or our past mistakes, what would that look like?” he asked.  “Why do we do what we do? Why do we hurt each other when what we really want is love? If we have one eye on the past and the other on an unending future, what happens to the present?”  

Last September, Taw’s play received a staged reading by Infinity Box Theatre Project along with a panel discussion including a neuroscientist, an AI researcher, and a theologian at the University Heights Center.  “I learned so much from when the audience appeared confused, and when people leaned forward and audibly gasped,” Taw shared. “Roger Tang, Boss Hawg at Pork Filled Productions, attended that reading and encouraged me to submit to Unleashed in order to have the opportunity to refine the script with the support of a dramaturg.”  

Rachel Rene Araucto will again direct C[Y]PHER.  “My hope is that in Unleashed, the story will find its proper balance of humanity and science, deep thought with deep feeling, comedy and desperation,” Taw said. 

For playwright Doan, his exploration in Eggshell; or Vỏ Trứng stems from childhood.  “Growing up, I didn’t celebrate the fullness of my truth,” he admitted. “Instead, I struggled with feeling othered and desperately wanted to fit in.”  

Only after Doan understood whiteness as a social construction did he begin to take pride in his identity. “Eggshell; or Vỏ Trứng is a personal excavation of my internalized racism and a confrontation of the trauma tied to assimilation,” he shared. “It is, all at once, an act of self-condemnation, self-forgiveness, and self-empowerment.”  

Doan’s process to create this piece has been both short and long.  “I poured out a 75-page first draft over three days during Christmas 2018, but I’ve spent the last seven years refining the language, character arcs, and structure,” he said. “Through feedback, collaboration, and developmental workshops, I’ve aimed to bring more light and catharsis to the work of advocacy for the celebration of identity in its full, unfiltered truth.”  

At the Unleashed festival, Doan is looking forward to learning about a new generation of storytellers.  “I’m most looking forward to the diversity of unabashed wildness in new Asian-American stories,” he said.  “Having previously worked in the greater Seattle area as an actor in 2022, I’m thrilled to return, this time as a playwright, to share my work with a community that values experimentation, honesty, and cultural nuance.”  

And for Silva, Hail/Mary Maria began in 2019 as a challenge to write his first play, a one-person show, tackling his identity crisis of trying to assimilate into American culture, in both an all-boys school environment and a devout Catholic home.  “It evolved into the play that it is now, a story about a boy named Kid, Kindness for short, who gets dropkicked into falling in love for the first time,” Silva said. “I wanted to go back to this story and let it live in its own world, a wrestling show in Kid’s imagination where he can be safe, explore, and ask questions to try and find himself.”  

Silva is now looking at the story through a lens of love.  “Not only in a romantic comedy way with his crush on Jack, but also in finding what Kid loves about his mom and his Filipino culture,” Silva said, “proving to himself he can have the same excitement he has for wrestling with his own identity and family.”  

Hail/Mary Maria had a presentation last August at CIRCA Pintig and The Ampliverse in Chicago, and a professional wrestler who is queer and Filipino was cast as Kid.  “Their reflections on the characters gave me so much to explore, filling out Kid’s world even further,” Silva reported. “The workshop also led me to exploring the fantasy of the play even further, setting more of Kid’s imagination as a wrestling show he is booking in his mind.”  

With this new Unleashed workshop, Silva is seeking ways to ground Kid in his daily Filipino culture, and reflect that out in Kid’s self-expression at school and with his crush Jack. “The current cast has given me so much to sink my teeth into in creating a richer world for Kid to live in,” Silva recognized, “and being intentional with specific Filipino nuances that I hope the Seattle audience can relate to and connect with.”  

Finally, Park’s play The Machine was initially conceived during their senior year of college, when they considered writing about race and attraction in a magical realism setting, but were initially dissuaded by a professor.  “I was told that I should try to steer away from stories that were so ‘politically preachy,’” Park relayed.   “When I was presented the opportunity in 2023 to write an original piece for NYC-based group, Theatre Write Now, I returned to the story.”  

The play is based on a dating experience Park had in college. “A white friend that I had a crush on for a long time rejected me in favor of another Asian nonbinary student in our friend group who was a skinnier and lighter-skinned version of me,” Park admitted. “I wanted to write something expressing how trapping it can feel to be Asian or queer.”  

As Park has revised this play about living as one’s authentic self, its focus has shifted away from gender and more toward race.  “At the last staged reading, The Machine‘s audience tended more toward the white and queer demographic,” Park reported. “I’m interested in seeing how it’s transformed at PFP, both through the work of a primarily Asian-American creative team and an Asian-American audience.”  

That curiosity leaves Park opens to discovery at Unleashed.  “Something that I’m still struggling to find both as a transgender Asian-American and as a writer is a balance,” Park said, “and this play is definitely a bit of a balancing act where I try to straddle both themes.” 

Unleashed: New Plays for a New World runs from June 20 to 22 at Theatre Off Jackson, 409 Seventh Avenue South, Seattle.