BIG FLOWER EATER: Women in Asian History and American Theater

Join Victoria Linchong, Kim Chinh and Katherine Yew in a conversation about their devised experimental play BIG FLOWER EATER, which explores the untold history of women in Asia through shamanism in three different Asian cultures. Excerpts of the play will be performed and screened.

BIG FLOWER EATER is a scholarly and whimsical collage of folktale, ritual, dance and historical text that collides feminism with folklore in the Hmong, Korean and Taiwanese cultures . When Selena pastes her grandmother’s fortunes on her bathroom wall, she unwittingly sets off a host of unearthly activities in her small Lower East Side lavatory. Only her friend Esther can stem the spiritual unrest, but first she has to channel her Korean grandmother and come to terms with the long tradition of shamanism in her now-Christian family. The play was performed at Theater for the New City in February 2013.

Linchong, Chinh, and Yew will also share their own experiences as Asian-American women theater artists and discuss both the push for gender parity in theater by 2020 and the current struggle for representation of Asian-Americans in mainstream theater.