Sister
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Xiàoyán
SYNOPSIS
It’s summertime in China. A 30-year-old woman returns home from the United States, only to find her teenage sister nearly unrecognizable. As the sisters and their mother wait anxiously for the father’s arrival, what should be a joyful reunion quickly cracks with long-buried tensions and the absurdity of social media.
PLAYWRIGHT’S BIO
Born and raised in China, Xiaoyan Kang started to write plays in English while studying under Philip Gotanda at Berkeley. Her plays include The Words of Ants (Playwrights Realm Scratchpad Series, Great Plains Theatre Commons, Jane Chambers Award runner-up, Alliance Theatre/Kendeda National Graduate Playwriting Award finalist), The Obituary (Sewanee Writers’ Conference Horton Foote Scholarship, KCACTF V Julie Jensen Playwriting Award honorable mention), and Bound (BBC International Radio Playwriting Competition Regional Winner, O’Neill Semi-Finalist, KCACTF V Paul Stephen Lim Playwriting Award). Some of her short plays were developed at 24 Hour Plays: Nationals and KCACTF V. MFA: Iowa Playwrights Workshop.
A BIT ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT
When did you start writing plays? If you had a moment where you realized you wanted to write, what was it?
I took playwriting classes as an undergraduate, but I always struggled to come up with stories and never imagined I’d pursue playwriting as a career. In 2021, I was isolated in the United States while the COVID situation in China worsened. I became increasingly concerned about my family back home and began checking in with them every day. One of those daily calls was to my paternal grandmother, whom I’d disliked as a child. As our regular check-ins stalled into long, awkward silences, I started to ask questions about her past, which I’d never been interested in before. That opened a rabbit hole where I began to understand what had shaped her into who she is today, and for the first time, I truly felt the urge to write a play. Since then, I’ve been writing plays, seeking to understand people and the circumstances that shape their choices and identities.
How did you come to write your OOB play? Was there a particular inspiration behind its creation? How has it developed?
I wrote this play for the annual bake-off at the Iowa Playwrights Workshop, where we were given a weekend to cook a short play out of given ingredients. At the time, I was struggling to understand my teenage sister, who seemed obsessed with her phone. Her social media content often felt alien and bizarre to me, and she used a lot of online slang in real life. This play is my attempt to make sense of family relationships in the age of social media.
What are five words that describe who you are as a playwright?
Curious, whimsical, deadpan humor, character-driven, persistent.
What/who are some of the major influences on your writing?
Anton Chekhov, surrealist art and literature, Chinese puppetry traditions, and my mentors, especially Professor Lisa Schlesinger, Dare Clubb and Philip Kan Gotanda.
What’s one fact someone would never guess about you?
I dream every night, and my dreams often unfold into surrealism. I believe alternative universes exist and dreams are the portals that connect them.
What are some of your favorite plays?
Mia Chung’s You For Me For You, Lucy Kirkwood’s Mosquitoes, Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive, and all of Chekhov’s plays.
Any new projects you’re working on or shameless plugs?
I’m currently working on my play The Words of Ants, which follows the journey of the last natural inheritor of an almost-extinct women’s language in China. This play explores varied perspectives of people who approach the language for different purposes and the complicated relationships between them. It asks the question: what’s the cost of making a private language public? This play will be presented at the Iowa New Play Festival in early May, at GPTC in late May, and at The Playwrights Realm as part of the Scratchpad Series in June. I’m also working on a new play To Kill a Pig, which focuses on the scam industry in Asia. It explores how the isolation of older generations makes them susceptible to scams and how their loneliness can be momentarily alleviated through these fraudulent interactions. At the same time, the play explores the motivations of the perpetrators: what drives them to exploit others and how systemic inequalities and economic desperation shape their choices.
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