Current Student Annie Jin Wang Dramaturg for Bay Area Production of Professor David Henry Hwang’s ‘Flower Drum Song’

By
Paola Alexandra Soto
April 26, 2019

Annie Jin Wang ’20 (Dramaturgy) will be the dramaturg for Flower Drum Song with book by Professor David Henry Hwang (Faculty). Directed by Lily Tung Crystal, with music direction by Amanda Ku, and choreography by Alex Hsu, the production will run from April 27 to May 12 at the Palo Alto Players in California. Flower Drum Song tells the story of Mei-Li who flees Mao's communist China after the murder of her father and finds herself in San Francisco's Chinatown. She is befriended by Wang, who is struggling to keep the Chinese opera tradition alive despite his son's determination to turn the old opera house into a Western-style nightclub. 

In an interview for The Mercury News the director for the Palo Alto Players production stated that “the original musical was written by white men. The depiction of Chinese immigrant men and women was quite shallow and stereotypical.” Crystal and Hwang’s adaptation “took back the story to better represent the Chinese immigrant experience in the United States.” For Wang this has been an important part of her decision to work as a dramaturg on the production which has a cast of 20 performers, all from the Bay Area, and all part of the Asian diaspora. The show “is representative of Asian Americans. We brought in a dialect coach and other cultural consultants. We’d like to give a really good representation of issues surrounding identity,” Crystal told Mercury News.

According to NBC News the production is “daring, vibrant, and charming!”. For more information and to purchase tickets click here.

Annie Jin Wang is a New York-based Chinese-American dramaturg, writer, and visual artist. From new play development to revitalizing classic texts for today’s audiences, Annie’s body of work primarily investigates constructs of race, gender, and citizenship through a compassionate and critical lens. Annie is a proud company member of Ferocious Lotus Theatre Company, an alumna of the Wellesley College Shakespeare Society, a former intern at The Play Company, and a staff writer at The Female Gaze. She is currently an MFA candidate in Dramaturgy at Columbia University School of the Arts and a graduate of Wellesley College.

David Henry Hwang is a Tony Award winning playwright and director of the playwriting concentration in the Theater program, he adapted the Rodgers and Hammerstein’s eighth musical which was based on the novel by C.Y. Lee. The original book was written by Oscar Hammerstein and Joseph Fields. He is best known as the author of M. Butterfly. Which won a Tony Award, Drama Desk Award, John Gassner Award, and Outer Critics Circle Award, it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In late 2017, it was revived on Broadway, directed by Julie Taymor. His newest “play with music,” Soft Power, with composer Jeanine Tesori (Fun Home), directed by frequent collaborator Leigh Silverman, premiered in spring 2018 at Los Angeles’ Ahmanson Theatre and will open in New York in 2019. Soft Power received six L.A. Ovation Awards in 2019.