East West Players artistic director Lily Tung Crystal has unveiled the lineup for her inaugural season at the helm of the nation’s oldest and largest producer of Asian American theater.
The company’s 60th anniversary season includes a blend of classic texts and bold new works, all which are from Asian American writers and will be presented at the David Henry Hwang Theater in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo district.
“I wanted the season to honor our elders who paved the way for the past 60 years, and also to uplift the new generation who are coming forward in the next 60 years,” Tung Crystal told The Times last week.
“Throughout this season, I want people to see the power and artistry of Asian American theater in the United States: we’re not only creating the Asian American theater canon, but we’re creating the American theater canon.”
The season launches with the L.A. premiere of Lauren Yee’s “Cambodian Rock Band” (Feb. 13-March 9, 2025), about a Khmer Rouge survivor who returns to Cambodia after 30 years as his daughter prepares to prosecute one of the country’s most notorious war criminals. Featuring classic Cambodian rock hits and songs from the L.A. band Dengue Fever, the play made its world premiere at South Coast Repertory in 2018 and has since been programmed all over the country.
“Yee’s play is a fierce, gorgeous, heartwarming, comedic fairy tale set against one of history’s grisliest mass extinctions,” wrote Margaret Gray in her review for The Times in 2018. “Yee has made her characters so joyfully and ridiculously human that it’s impossible — to a heartbreaking degree — not to identify with them.”
Joe Ngo, Abraham Kim, Brooke Ishibashi, Jane Lui and Raymond Lee in the world premiere of “Cambodian Rock Band” at South Coast Repertory in 2018.
(Jordan Kubat/South Coast Repertory)
This production, which will reunite the world premiere’s original cast and director Chay Yew, brings the show to Los Angeles County, the home of the largest ethnically Cambodian population outside of Cambodia. Center Theatre Group initially planned for the piece to play at the Mark Taper Forum, but that run was canceled due to CTG’s programming pause last season.
Tung Crystal had helmed a Theater Mu/Jungle Theater co-production of the play in 2022, and while planning this EWP season, “I thought, it’s too bad that L.A. never had its production, especially since Lauren was inspired to write the show because she went to a Dengue Fever concert here,” she said. “L.A. deserves its own production of this magnificent show.” (And it’s moving forward with CTG’s blessing, with artistic director Snehal Desai telling The Times, “We are thrilled that East West Players is able to bring this incredibly powerful work to LA.”)
The season continues with a revival of Philip Kan Gotanda‘s “Yankee Dawg You Die” (July 3-27, 2025), about two Asian American actors at different stages of their careers, and the painful compromises required of actors of color to succeed in Hollywood. The play, which debuted in L.A. in 1988, was last staged by East West Players in 2001.
“It’s a beautiful play that still really captures the obstacles and challenges about representation in Hollywood for Asian American actors,” said Tung Crystal of the two-actor text. “Including it as part of our 60th season, it’s a reminder of the obstacles we’ve had and, decades later, the obstacles we’re still fighting to overcome.”
East West Players then presents the simultaneous world premiere of Prince Gomolvilas’ “Paranormal Inside” (Oct. 9-Nov. 2, 2025) with Theater Mu in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota and Perseverance Theater in Juneau, Alaska.
The previously announced supernatural play is a haunting sequel to Gomolvilas’ “The Brothers Paranormal,” about two Thai siblings who launch a ghost-hunting enterprise. Jeff Liu, who helmed EWP’s production of “The Brothers Paranormal” in 2022, will direct the subsequent co-commission.
David Huynh and Roy Vongtama in “The Brothers Paranormal” at East West Players in 2022.
(Jenny Graham/East West Players)
The season also includes the Southern California premiere of Jaclyn Backhaus‘ “Wives” (March 5-29, 2026), about some of history’s most influential men through the eyes of their equally formidable spouses. The historically subversive comedy, which debuted off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in 2019, jumps between 16th century France, 1920s India and 1960s Idaho, and will feature a South Asian and South Asian American cast.
“One of my visions is to try to represent the Asian American diaspora as diversely and comprehensively as possible, so it was important to include a piece by a South Asian American writer in the season,” said Tung Crystal. “But also, ‘Wives’ is a sign of what’s to come at East West Players: feminist work, work by women and nonbinary writers, incisive and innovative work that’s intersectional in terms of gender, race, queerness and other marginalized communities.”
The season wraps with a production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Flower Drum Song” (May 28-June 21, 2026), featuring a newly updated book by David Henry Hwang. The playwright previously revised the golden-era musical — about Mei-li, a young Chinese opera artist who arrives in 1950s San Francisco Chinatown and is immediately drawn into the dazzling world of the Grant Avenue nightclubs — with a rethought libretto in 2001; that version premiered at the Mark Taper Forum before a brief Broadway run.
Playwright David Henry Hwang, photographed in 2011.
(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
Tung Crystal always planned on including a Hwang text in EWP’s 60th anniversary season — “His name is on our theater, after all!” she said with a laugh — and it was Hwang who suggested debuting a revised “Flower Drum Song,” something he’s been wanting to do for some time.
“‘Flower Drum Song’ changed my life because, as a young person watching the movie, it was the first time I’d seen Asian American actors and singers of that caliber onscreen,” said Tung Crystal, who directed a production at Palo Alto Players in 2019 and will helm the new version at East West Players. “And though the original has its flaws and stereotypes, it has a soft spot in my heart as an homage to San Francisco Chinatown, a place that’s very important to me.”
East West Players is also continuing its Theatre for Youth tour initiative of commissioning playwrights to create pieces about Asian American and Pacific Islander historical figures. This season’s Theatre for Youth touring production is a return engagement of Elizabeth Wong’s “Tam Tran Goes to Washington,” which was commissioned in 2017 and centers on an undocumented dreamer who becomes a student activist.
