Finishing a show is never easy. Every single play/workshop/reading/event that I work on feels like a small piece of my soul that I get to fuse with other people’s souls and present to the world for a brief, magical amount of time. Existing in the same place as other creatives, working towards the same goal, building and creating and collaborating, is vulnerable and miraculous. Trust is required on every level, trust that you sometimes only have days to build and nurture.

I have spent the past year agonizing over my artistic future. In early 2021, when I was first vaccinated, it was easy for me to say that I would return to in-person collaborations in 2022. At that point, this year still felt far away. The vaccines were new and everyone seemed to want one and I thought, finally, after a year of following guidelines and the advice of my cardiologist, I would get to step into this new world of work and remember what it felt like to create in the same physical space as my collaborators.

As 2021 progressed, however, it quickly became clear that the world was not growing safer. That, while the vaccines are life-saving, public opinion and unwillingness to protect others were going to ensure COVID’s continuance. As guidelines were peeled back and I struggled with the knowledge that I am part of the acceptable collateral damage of high-risk, immunocompromised, and disabled folks in the pandemic, fear and grief started to seep into my creative life as well. Even if I wanted to return to in-person directing, would it matter? I don’t know of a single show that had an uninterrupted run from 2021 to about March 2022. How do you toe the line of minimizing risk and trusting that people can make their own choices? What is the new world of advocating for your collaborators when everything you do has a new layer of added risk? Do I even remember how to be a collaborator, how to find my way into a play, how to let part of my soul become vulnerable and open to change?

HOT ASIAN DOCTOR HUSBAND is my first full in-person process since February 2020. There have been so many things that have terrified me, not the least of which has been the ever-present awareness that I have already had COVID once following my grandfather’s funeral and that all advice says that I really, REALLY should try not to get it again. But the moment I read that script, the moment I first talked to Buffie at Alley Rep, I knew that, if they would have me, I needed to do this.

Every single piece I get to work on, whether for a day or for a month, that looks at me as a human being and sees me for all that I am as a mixed-race woman is a gift that I cannot take for granted. In HOT ASIAN DOCTOR HUSBAND, I see myself in Emi, in Veronica. I see my relationship with my wonderful white partner, whose empathy and willingness to listen through the most difficult moments of negotiating my identity is overwhelming. I see all of the hard conversations that we have had, all of my doubts about myself that I project on him. I see my relationship with my mom and with our culture and my own struggle to see her face in mine, my own need for the validation that I am enough as I am and that it doesn’t matter that sometimes people see me as everything but what I actually am. And I see it all tied together with a show that I have loved fiercely my entire life, that I have been made to feel equal parts shame and pride in my love for, that I have continued to return to over and over and over and over again: Sailor Moon.

It’s hard to describe how much this show, here, in Boise, with this group of incredible people, means to me. The most difficult part of my job as a director is always this moment. The moment that I have to step back, hand the keys to the stage manager and actors, and let them drive on without me. I am never quite ready for it, and, on this show, I don’t think I ever would be. The journey that they now get to go on, of playing and growing and living in this world built from pieces of all of our souls, is something that I have to watch from afar. But I trust these Sailor Scouts and their journey for love through grief and pain and Demi Lovato remixes. May we all leave the theatre transformed.

Ticket info can be found here: https://alleyrep.org/hot-asian-doctor-husband/