CHINGLISH, the new comedy by Tony Award-winning and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly), begins previews at the Longacre Theatre (220 West 48th Street) on Tuesday, October 11th and will officially open on Thursday, October 27th. The show comes to Broadway following its critically acclaimed world premiere production at Goodman Theatre in Chicago this summer, which ran from June 18th through July 31st.

Jennifer Lim, Angela Lin, Christine Lin, Stephen Pucci, Johnny Wu and Larry Lei Zhang who appeared in the production at the Goodman, will be joined by Gary Wilmes, star of the recent acclaimed Gatz. OBIE Award winner Leigh Silverman, who directed Lisa Kron’s Well on Broadway and won a 2011 OBIE for directing both Go Back To Where You Are and In The Wake, will return to direct the Broadway production.

Hwang’s new comedy CHINGLISH is about the challenges of doing business in a culture whose language—and ways of communicating—are worlds apart from our own. An American businessman arrives in a bustling Chinese province looking to score a lucrative contact for his family’s sign-making firm. He soon finds that the complexities of such a venture far outstrip the expected differences in language, customs and manners – and calls into questions even the most basic assumptions of human conduct.

Tickets are available for purchase on

The 2011 – 2012 Mu Performing Arts 20th Anniversary mainstage season lineup kicks off on October 15 at Mixed Blood Theatre with the world premiere of Four Destinies, directed by Suzy Messerole. The play by local playwright Katie Hae Leo is a satirical exploration of adoption through the eyes of Destiny Jones, a single character represented from four different ethnic backgrounds, as she/he grows up in a Minnesota family. Leo, herself a Korean adoptee, presents herself as a character determined to embody the overarching adoptee experience, both in youth and adulthood. Four Destinies has been in development for the past two years through Mu’s Jerome New Performance Program, a platform for emerging Asian American theater voices to create and present edgy new work.

Mu Performing Arts Artistic director Rick Shiomi invited me to Minneapolis, providing me with an all-access pass to the production during rehearsals.

It is the opening night of performance of Katie Hae Leo’s Four Destinies, helmed by Suzy Messerole and presented by Mu Performing Arts, the second largest Asian American Theater Company in the U.S, and the lobby of Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis is abuzz with excitement.

Reme Grefalda, curator of the Asian American Pacific Islander Collection located in the Asian Division of the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. and I flew in to photograph the cast in rehearsal for my Library of Congress collection, the Lia Chang Theater Photography Portfolio/AAPI Collection in the Asian Division at the Library of Congress, and to celebrate opening night.