playwright, composer, lyricist
BREAKUP BENCH
Breakup Bench is a three-person actor-musician pop-eretta about a girl who takes dates to the same park bench to break up with them. One day, her bench disappears and she finds herself stuck in a long-term relationship she doesn’t want to be in, unable to call things off without it. Then her first love pops back into the picture and a whole new set of problems arise. While navigating the maze that is modern dating, the three learn to cope with their relationships in love – real, fake, and lack thereof.
This was born out of a self-imposed challenge to write a ten-minute musical the summer of 2016. After receiving financial support from the Mary Gates Endowment for Scholars in 2017, the show expanded into a one-act, having its first public reading at the University of Washington. It has since been showcased at Ovations! and the Village Theatre’s Northwest Songwriters Showcase. It received further development at The Scratch in 2019, and prior to the pandemic it was set to make its production debut August 2020 at Annex Theatre.
“The show is uplifting, hilarious, touching, and heartbreaking.”
MEDIA & TESTIMONIALS
DIRECTOR’S NOTES:
New Musical ‘Breakup Bench’ at The Scratch this Week
playwright, composer, lyricist
CULTURAL ESSAY
CULTURAL ESSAY was created in conjunction with the Pocket Theater’s 2018 Solo Performers Month. It is a solo-musical that takes the audience back 2012, when Rhe was a senior in high school applying for colleges and struggling to write a cultural essay. How do you write about the culture you’re immersed in when, your entire life, you’ve felt like a fraud in your own skin? Exploring themes of identity, belonging, and cultural dysphoria, this show highlights the expansiveness of the Asian-Pacific-American experience.
This biographical slice of life incorporates live looping and a number of acoustic original songs about self-love and identity.
photo by Giant Albatross