Alumni-Led One Woman Show 'Welcome to My Room' Debuts in NYC 

An interdisciplinary team of School of the Arts alumni has launched Welcome to My Room, a one-woman show comprising a dynamic blend of musical concert, poetry, and personal narrative. The ensemble recently presented a workshop performance in the East Village Basement, a multipurpose theatre/art space, before heading to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this August, where the play will run from August 2 to 10.

The creative team is made up of Acting alumna Yeena Sung '20, Writer, Performer and Producer; Directing alumna Chaesong Kim '23, Director; and Sound Art alumnus Anthony Sertel Dean '22, the show's Designer and Production Manager.

Welcome to My Room, inspired by Sung’s experiences living in New York, follows ‘Y,’ a Korean expat turned New Yorker. The performance explores themes of perpetual foreignness and the complexities of inhabiting a female body. It aims to evoke “vulnerability, warmth, and comfort” while providing a platform to unlearn societal conditioning, confront internalized oppression, and grieve isolation and cultural loss.

“This play really came out of a hunger,” Sung said. “It's based on my story living in New York as a Korean/Korean-American, and really trying to find my sense of home as I was feeling like I don't belong anywhere."

Sung wrote the multi-genre play using songs and found elements that she had been collecting for years. "Now that we're opening," she said, "I'm realizing all of these elements of the show that were always there. One of the songs I actually wrote back in 2019, and it fit right into the story. And there's a diary that I found from middle school [where I wrote about] the meaning of my name and my dreams." That diary became a prop in the show, along with several other symbolic elements like fish, photos of Sung's family, and voice recordings of her grandparents. 

When it came time to reach out to directors, Sung already had Kim in mind. "I was always a huge fan of Chaesong," she said, "but we didn't actually get to work together until this year. As I was writing this piece, I thought 'only Chaesong can direct this.' So I was delighted when she [agreed]." 

The team was completed when Dean, who is proficient not just in sound design, but also lighting and projections, signed on. "It's a dream team for sure," said Sung. "We collaborate really well. A lot of the time I feel like we're on the same wavelength, which is a really nice feeling."

After its successful workshop run, the team is preparing to take Welcome to My Room to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the world's largest performing arts festival, taking place from August 2 to 26 this year. The annual festival showcases more than 59,600 performances of 3,841 different shows across 322 venues.

Learn more about the play's festival run and purchase tickets here.