From Sept. 24-30, Wellesley Repertory Theatre (WRT) held a multi-day festival that showcased three alums’ original theatrical productions, with talkbacks with students about their work. Housed at Wellesley College, WRT is a professional theater company in residence year-round with the mission of supporting Wellesley graduates working in theater. This year’s festival showcased the work of its grantees: Sabina Seth Umni ’19, Maia Macdonald ’06, and Annie Jin Wang ’14.
Umni’s play “Flood Sensor Aunty” was the first to premiere at the WRT festival. A comedy centering a flood sensor who works at a chai shop and is an aspiring movie star, the play weaves in a message about how communities can protect themselves from flooding and climate change through knowing their neighbors. Audience members were greeted in the amphitheater with free chai before the performance, and were encouraged to connect with local disaster prevention resources in greater Boston. Umni had several talkbacks with students, including those from the Shakespeare Society, the anthropology department and the Frost Center for the Environment, in which she discussed how her creative skills intersect with activism and urban planning in New York City.
On the same night that “Flood Sensory Aunty” premiered, “Slow Motion Cumbia” performed on the Alumnae Auditorium stage in an intimate, small-audience setup. Before the show, attendees could observe props made for the production, such as letters, clothing and instruments that worked to tell the story. Macdonald’s production was very music and multimedia-based, with video projections, radio and a live band performing throughout the evening.
To conclude the festival, students attended Wang’s work-in-process, “The Actress Who Died A Thousand Deaths,” an experimental, surreal retrospective and fantasia through the extraordinary life and body of work of Anna May Wong, one of the first and most iconic Asian women in early Hollywood cinema. The production was a multimedia production featuring live film projections from different angles to tell the story of younger and older Anna May Wong.
Wang was first introduced to Anna May Wong in Elena Creef’s Asian American Women in Film class her junior spring.
“Wellesley was the place where I was first able to really start exploring and understanding my complex identities through studying images of other Asian American women throughout history, and being able to refract that artistically through Anna May Wong for this piece is a true full-circle moment,” Wang said.
Wang’s biggest goal as an artist is to move past the topic of representation and truly advance conversations around the positionality of the Asian American community in this country and throughout the world.
Wang emphasized how unique and necessary the WRT Festival is to the American theater landscape: “All three projects in our inaugural cohort reaffirm that theater can — and should — take many forms, and that live performance can still be a potent medium through which to bring us closer to each other and communicate important personal, social, and political ideas through art.”
An open rehearsal for Wang’s piece “The Actress Who Died A Thousand Deaths” was part of the festival schedule, because Wang felt it was important to let folks into the rehearsal process, because theater takes a lot of time and labor that audiences don’t often see.
Wang was touched by how many people from every corner of the Wellesley community showed up and engaged with the work, either as an audience member or as a participant in their open rehearsal.
“My favorite part of the Festival was having the opportunity to visit classrooms across so many departments to share my unconventional journey towards theater, and help connect dots between what they’re currently learning and how they hope to walk through the world in the future.”
