Description
Anna May Wong: The Actress Who Died A Thousand Deaths takes place in a surrealist dreamscape within Asian American screen icon Anna May Wong’s mind and memories, exploring the racial, gender, class, and cultural tensions an ambitious Chinatown girl faced as she became a Hollywood actress. Intercut with real and imagined conversations between Wong and important people throughout her life including her father, Warner Oland, and Marlene Dietrich, this experimental play utilizes an ensemble of five performers, ‘live cinema performance’, and archival footage to recreate and reframe iconic scenes from Wong’s films, subverting the type-cast, orientalist tropes she constantly portrayed. Rather than simply recreate Anna May Wong’s iconography, the live camera is used as a tool of empowerment to redirect the gaze that often fetishized Wong’s identity onscreen, serving both its literal function and acting as a metaphorical lens for the audience to more intimately experience Wong’s perspective as an Asian American artist ahead of her time. ‘Live cinema performance’ not only reveals the careful artifice that goes into crafting one’s image, but also sheds light on the power and influence of representation in our lives. Anna May Wong is co-conceived by Annie Jin Wang and Cinthia Chen under the aegis of their creative partnership MOONGATE.
Date & Time
Sep 26 - 27, 2025
Venue Details
Ruth Nagel Jones Black Box Theatre
106 Central StreetWellesley, Massachusetts 02481
