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“I love working with scale. I was attracted to the idea of wrestling with a great sweeping romance, larger than life characters, political intrigue, and historical storytelling on this epic canvas. I also wanted to explore one of the greatest characters in history—a complicated and powerful queen caught between her love for Antony and trying to save herself and her kingdom.” Christopher Chen
Playwright
Christopher Chen
Christopher Chen is an Obie Award-winning playwright whose work has been performed across the United States and abroad. His plays include Caught (Obie Award for Playwriting, Barrymore Award, Drama League Nomination), The Hundred Flowers Project (Glickman Award, Rella Lossy Award, James Tait Black Award shortlist), Into The Numbers (Belarus Free Theater International Contest of Modern Drama- 2nd Place), The Late Wedding, Mutt, Passage and You Mean To Do Me Harm. Chris is the recipient of the Lanford Wilson Award, the Sundance Institute/Time Warner Fellowship, the Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, and he is the inaugural recipient of the Ollie Award. Current commissions include Audible, LCT3, Manhattan Theatre Club, Playwrights Horizons, the Royal Shakespeare Company and The Wilma. A San Francisco native, Chris is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley, and holds an M.F.A. in playwriting from S.F. State.
Dramaturg
Desdemona Chiang
Desdemona Chiang is a Taiwan-born American stage director and writer based in Seattle, WA and Ashland, OR. She works in a variety of genres, including new plays, Shakespeare, and musicals. Chiang is known for her visceral, no-nonsense approach to theatre, with her distinct point of view as an immigrant and Asian American woman, and an interest in using storytelling to spark social discourse. Her directing credits include The 5th Avenue Theatre (Seattle, WA), Guthrie Theater (Minneapolis), Alley Theatre (Houston), Oregon Shakespeare Festival (Ashland, OR), South Coast Repertory (Costa Mesa, CA), Pittsburgh Public Theatre, Baltimore Center Stage, Seattle Repertory Theatre, Studio Theatre (Washington DC), Long Wharf Theatre (New Haven, CT), Seattle Children’s Theatre, and ACT Theatre (Seattle).
Chiang recently wrote her first TV pilot Made in USA, which has been developed with the Sundance Episodic Intensive Lab, The Orchard Project, the Writers Lab, and was a winner of the WeScreenplay Diverse Voices Lab. Her stage adaptation of Amy Tan’s novel The Bonesetter’s Daughter will have its world premiere in the summer of 2022.
Awards: Princess Grace Award, Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise, SDC Sir John Gielgud Directing Fellowship, Drama League TV/Film Fellowship.
MFA Directing: University of Washington.
In Print
Antony and Cleopatra
A lively contemporary translation of Shakespeare’s sexiest play.
In Antony and Cleopatra, Christopher Chen tackles the sweeping epic of love and betrayal at the center of the story of the rulers Antony of Rome and Cleopatra of Egypt. In this contemporary translation of the play, Chen brings the political intrigue and historical storytelling of Shakespeare to modern audiences while preserving the poetic foundation of the play’s language.
