An Evening with Lloyd Suh, Shannon Tyo, Daniel K. Isaac, & Christine Mok

The Drama Book Shop presents, in association with Jay Michaels Global Communications, An Evening with Lloyd Suh, Shannon Tyo, Daniel K. Isaac, & Christine Mok- A Talkback, signing and live podcast recording.

About the Book

Once in the Countryside: A Collection of Plays - Discover complex histories and experiences of Asian Americans through the work of 2023 Pulitzer Prize finalist Lloyd Suh.

For the past decade, Lloyd Suh has dramatized forgotten moments that have indelibly shaped American history. Through a sustained exploration of over 150 years of Asian and Asian American experiences, these plays contest the pastness of the past to reveal the unexpected ways that untold histories reverberate into the present. Suh's theatrical imagination, his stylistic and formal artistry, empathy, wit, and humor shine through unforgettable characters. Unique in scope and perspective, these history plays offer a powerful testament to the ingenuity and endurance of Asian America.

The Chinese Lady is a portrait of the United States as seen through the eyes of the first Chinese woman in America, Afong Moy, who was put on display, as she comes of age in a nation struggling to define itself. Set in the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Act, The Far Country is an intimate epic that traces the forging of an unlikely family through invented biographies and poems of longing from rural Taishan to the wild west of California. A play for young audiences, Bina's Six Apples follows Bina, whose family grows the finest apples in all of Korea, when war forces them to flee their home. With just six precious apples to her name, Bina discovers she is not the only one searching for family and a new home. In Charles Francis Chan Jr.'s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery, it is 1967 and Frank Chan and Kathy Ching are trying to stage a revolution but find themselves thrown into a metatheatrical cage match between a fledgling political identity and the malignant persistence of stereotypes and yellowface. In The Heart Sellers, recent immigrants Jane, from Korea, and Luna, from the Philippines, run into each other in a grocery store on Thanksgiving in 1973. Over the course of one impulsive evening, fueled by wine and roasted sweet potatoes, they confess their fears and share their hopes for an unknowable future in the United States.

In addition to these scripts, Once in the Countryside includes prefaces by theatre and performance studies scholars Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, Amy Huang, Ju Yon Kim, Christine Mok, and Elizabeth W. Son, and postscripts by theatre artists May Adrales, Jiyoun Chang, Peter Kim, Whit K. Lee, and Shannon Tyo. The collection opens with an introduction by editor Christine Mok and closes with an interview with the playwright himself. The plays, along with their context, criticism, and collaborative insight, offer an expansive view of Lloyd Suh's vision in an inaugural collection to inspire theatre-makers and students.

About the Authors

AUTHOR

Lloyd Suh is an award-winning, internationally produced playwright. His plays, which include The Heart Sellers, The Chinese Lady, The Far Country (Pulitzer Prize finalist), Bina’s Six Apples, Charles Francis Chan Jr.’s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery, Franklinland, American Hwangap, and others, have been produced at Atlantic Theater Company, Public Theater, Alliance Theatre, Huntington Theater, Milwaukee Rep, Denver Center, Magic Theatre, Berkeley Rep, Children's Theatre Company, Ma-Yi Theatre Company, and the National Asian American Theatre Company, among others. His work has been produced internationally at the Cultural Center of the Philippines and with PCPA at the Guerilla Theatre in Seoul, Korea. Awards include the Steinberg Playwright Award Guggenheim Fellowship, Herb Alpert Award, Horton Foote Prize, and Helen Merrill Award. He served as Director of Artistic Programs at The Lark from 2011-20. He was elected in 2016 to the Dramatists Guild Council, and serves as a Professor of the Practice at Princeton University.

EDITOR

Christine Mok is a dramaturg, designer, and scholar. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island. She has published in Theatre Survey, Theatre Journal, JADT, PAJ: A Performing Arts Journal, Modern Drama, and the Journal of Asian American Studies. She is co-editor with Joshua Chambers-Letson of Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s China Trilogy: Three Parables of Global Capital (Bloomsbury, 2021) and editor of Lloyd Suh’s Once in the Countryside: A Collection of Plays (Bloomsbury, 2025). She is a member of Wingspace Theatrical Design.

CONTRIBUTOR & PERFORMER

Shannon Tyo Broadway: Yellow Face. Off-Broadway: The Comeuppance (Signature Theatre), Regretfully, So the Birds Are (Playwrights Horizons), The Far Country (Atlantic Theater, Pulitzer finalist), peerless (Primary Stages), The Chinese Lady (Ma-Yi Theater at The Public), Kentucky (Ensemble Studio Theater), and Bikeman (Tribeca PAC). Select regional credits include The Good Book (Berkeley Rep), Fun Home (Baltimore Center Stage), The White Snake (The Old Globe), Broadway Bounty Hunter (Barrington Stage), Smart People (Geva Theatre), The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (Northern Stage, Tuacahn Center), and Miss Saigon (Pioneer Theatre, MT Wichita). She specializes in new works and has helped develop countless new plays and musicals in New York and around the country. Shannon has received two Obie Awards (Sustained Achievement in Performance, and a Special Citation for the cast of The Comeuppance), a Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Lead Performance in a Play (for The Chinese Lady), a Theater World Award, the Connecticut Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play, a Bessie nomination, and a Drama Desk nomination.

PERFORMER

Daniel K. Isaac can currently be seen as "Lt. Steve Connor" on the hit CBS series "Elsbeth". Previously he portrayed fan favorite "Ben Kim" on seven seasons of "Billions" for Showtime. Other television credits include "The Other Two", “The Expecting", "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver", “The Deuce”, “Crashing", Too Big To Fail, “The Jim Gaffigan Show”, and “Person of Interest”. Film credits include Outerlands, Caravan, Dirty Rhetoric, Plan B, The Drummer, Money Monster (dir. Jodie Foster). On stage, he received critical acclaim for Every Brilliant Thing (Geffen) for which he received the Los Angeles Drama Critic Circle Award for Solo Performance. Other theatre credits include You Will Get Sick (Roundabout, dir. Sam Pinkleton), The Chinese Lady (Drama Desk Nomination, Ma-Yi/Public), You Never Touched the Dirt (Clubbed Thumb), The Gentleman Caller (Abingdon), Sagittarius Ponderosa (NAATCO), Underland (59E59), La Divina Caricatura (La MaMa/St. Ann’s), and Anna Nicole the Opera (BAM). Regional: Every Brilliant Thing (Geffen), The Chinese Lady (Barrington Stage), The Ballad of Little Jo (Two River), Miss Electricity (La Jolla Playhouse). As a writer, Daniel’s work has been championed by MacDowell, Netflix, FX, Ma-Yi Theater Company, National Endowment for the Arts, MTC’s Groundworks Lab, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Barrington Stage, NYTW, Page73’s Writer's Group, Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Youngblood, Queens Theatre, The Tank, TheatreC, Leviathan Lab, and Lambda Literary. Daniel had his playwriting debut with ONCE UPON A (korean) TIME in the summer of 2022 with Ma-Yi Theater Company. DanielKIsaac.com

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