Immigrant Imaginations 1

 

[Immigrants and immigration has become a top-of-mind subject in recent years, especially so at this moment in time.  When I saw that the Theatre Communications Group’s quarterly magazine American Theatre entitled its Summer 2025 issue “Immigrant Imaginations,” I thought it would be useful and interesting to repost some of the articles on the topic on my blog. 

[The first one that struck me is a conversation among six playwrights working in the U.S. whose origins are all beyond our borders.  In the published discussion, the writers touch on several aspects of their work that have been affected by their change of venue, so to speak.  Some of that has to do with culture, some with language, and some, I was curious to read, has to do with time.  I won’t try to explain that last one; I’ll let you read it for yourself.

[The article ran in volume 41, issue 4 (Summer 2025), of AT.  It was also posted on the journal’s website on 29 July 2025.] 

“HERE, THERE, AND EVERYWHERE:
AN IMMIGRANT THEATREMAKERS ROUNDTABLE”

by Lyndsey Bourne 

Immigrant theatremakers working in the U.S. reflect on what they write 
and who they’re writing for.

“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.”

That’s an Agnès Varda quote I love. I think about it often. These past few months, I’ve been thinking about landscape and place, and how they are present in a play. How, for example, Cuba feels so present in María Irene Fornés’s work.

[Agnès Varda (1928-2019) was a Belgian-born French film director, screenwriter, and photographer. The quotation is from her 2008 autobiographical documentary film The Beaches of Agnès (Les plages d'Agnès; Ciné-tamaris and Arte France Cinéma; distributed by Les Films du Losange).

[María Irene Fornés (1930-2018) was a Cuban-American playwright, theater director, and teacher who worked in Off-Broadway and experimental theater venues in the last four decades of the twentieth century. See a report on Fornés’s play Drowning in “Signature Plays” (3 June 2016).]  

I’m a playwright, a Canadian with an O-1 visa. I’ve been living in New York for nearly 15 years. Even when the plays I write are set in the U.S., somehow I’m always writing Canada.

[According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency within the Department of Homeland Security that administers lawful immigration and naturalization, the O-1 visa is for the nonimmigrant individual

who possesses extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics, or who has a demonstrated record of extraordinary achievement in the motion picture or television industry and have been recognized nationally or internationally for those achievements.

[There are two classifications of O-1 visas; the applicable one for this discussion is the second one (O-1B):

O-1A: individuals with an extraordinary ability in the sciences, education, business, or athletics (not including the arts, motion pictures or television industry)

O-1B: individuals with an extraordinary ability in the arts, or extraordinary achievement in motion picture or television industry

[There are also special visa classifications for those accompanying O-1 visa holders.  See the USCIS website for details.]

In early April over Zoom, I spoke with a group of international playwrights all living and making theatre in the U.S., writing stories and landscapes between places: Bazeed [aka: Mariam Bazeed; born ca. 1976 in Kuwait; relocated with their family to Eqypt during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990], an Egyptian playwright, poet, performer, and multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn; Francisco Mendoza, a playwright who was born in Argentina and partly raised in Brazil before moving to the U.S. a decade ago, now also based in Brooklyn; Stefani Kuo [b. 1995], a playwright and actor raised in both Hong Kong and Taiwan now based in New York City; Khristián Méndez Aguirre, a director and playwright from Guatemala now based in New York City and Austin; and Arun Welandawe-Prematilleke [b. ca. 1988 in Helsinki, Finland], a playwright and director (and sometimes actor) from Sri Lanka now based in New York City.

Together, we reflected on the ways our immigration status, cultural distance, and shifting audiences shape our work. It’s a precarious thing to be an immigrant artist—a tension too often made invisible. For immigrant and diasporic theatremakers working in the U.S., writing is often shaped not only by personal or political urgency, but by the realities of bureaucracy, translation, and institutional legibility.

Here we gathered to engage in questions of authenticity, audience, representation, and survival, from the politics of language and translation to the very real pressures of visa applications and institutional gatekeeping. We considered how lived experience shapes approaches to our artistry, and how for international artists working in America, storytelling itself becomes a site of both constraint and possibility. What happens when you write about a country you no longer live in? How do time, language, and place intervene in the storytelling?

Below are excerpts from our conversation, edited for concision and clarity.

LYNDSEY BOURNE: I want to start by asking about your writing practice. What is your process like these days? How are you thinking about your plays and where they come from? Who are they for?

FRANCISCO MENDOZA: I came to the U.S. as a student and then I transitioned to an O-1 visa. In some ways, the O-1 did shape the writing, because I was writing plays that were most easily going to lead to the kind of achievements that I needed to show for my visa. Then I got my green card, and my writing has gotten weirder and weirder. The further I walk away from the necessity of achievement, the more the plot doesn’t necessarily make logical sense. I am not as afraid to branch into a way of writing that maybe people won’t understand. And it’s okay if they don’t! I think the safety of not feeling like I have to perform has influenced, not necessarily the kind of stories I’m telling, but definitely how I’m telling them.

ARUN WELANDAWE-PREMATILLEKE: In Sri Lanka, I ran a theatre company [Mind Adventures Theatre Company in Colombo; an associate artistic director, 2011-17], and I worked with the same people from the time I was 18 until I was in my 30s. Moving somewhere else, of course, changes the way you work and what your concerns are. The day I got into NYU was the day everything shut down in the world [in 2020], so my first semester was in Sri Lanka over Zoom. But the writing changed when I was writing for that audience, even from home. At that time, we were heavily under the Mahinda Rajapaksa regime—essentially a dictatorship. My work had always been political, and we had always changed scripts to get through censor boards. I was very used to it, and I always felt like I was saying what I wanted to say. But the moment it had the safety of a different audience, the work changed—I became much more willing to point at the thing and name the thing in a very different way. If anything, I found a kind of political freedom.  

[Mahinda Rajapaksa (b. 1945) served as the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka from 2004 to 2005, then the sixth President of Sri Lanka from 2005 to 2015, and then PM again in 2018 and from 2019 to 2022. He was the Leader of the Opposition from 2002 to 2004 and 2018 to 2019, and the Minister of Finance from 2005 to 2015 and 2019 to 2021.

[When Rajapaksa was forced from office in 2022, he launched what amounted to an attempted coup, but ended up signing a letter of resignation. During his political career, he’s been accused of war crimes during the last years of the Sri Lankan civil war (1983-2009) as well as other criminal accusations including human rights violations during his presidency, corruption, and for instigating violence on anti-government protestors during the failed 2022 coup. As of 2023, he’s been sanctioned by Canada for human rights violations.]

STEFANI KUO: I write a lot about Hong Kong and Taiwan, especially Hong Kong. I remember going through a phase where I was reading about all these theatres and their mission statements, which all have the word “American” or “America” in it. So even if I’m writing about an international thing in Hong Kong, it still has to relate back to America. Sometimes the actors I work with in the U.S., even if they have heritage from where I’m from, don’t understand how to relate to my work, even if they speak the language or understand the culture from their grandparents or parents. That was shocking to me; I thought we were all in the same box. But there’s a gap because of where I grew up versus where they grew up.

That gap really interests me—the shared feeling of “I’m not from here.” It leads to my next question: A lot of the plays getting produced in the U.S. telling stories that represent other countries and other cultures are written by second- or third-generation Americans, who are often writing about the experiences of their own parents or grandparents. There are obvious reasons for this: Bureaucracy, gatekeeping, and systemic barriers make it much harder for immigrant artists to break through. As we’ve been saying, there are also the ways in which we have to tailor our writing to an American audience. Is this something you think about? How is this sitting with you?

KHRISTIÁN MÉNDEZ AGUIRRE: Right now, I’m trying to find Guatemalan actors and a director for a reading I’m doing, and you can imagine what that process is like. The assumption is that I have something in common with someone who is Guatemalan but perhaps grew up in the U.S. and is first-generation Guatemalan American. That’s an assumption that makes both of us legible to the artistic leadership of those institutions and how they make us legible to their audiences, because the question always is: Will the audience get it? Will the audience come? 

FRANCISCO: I think Americans are always more comfortable seeing immigration as a cultural issue rather than a legal one, because it demands less work to make space for a cultural experience than for a legal reality. I have been here 10 years and I’ve seen more and more plays about international experiences, and even about immigration, getting produced. Yes, the vast majority of those plays have been written by Americans, even if they come from families who were not originally American. So clearly the appetite for the experience is there. The barriers that prevent immigrants from getting to write and direct their own experiences on American stages are also in place. 

BAZEED: There is a divide that I feel as someone who very much still identifies as “fresh off the boat.” I am not from America. I am not of America. I just live here—and that has meaning in my life. There’s a sense of belonging that isn’t here. I’ve lived in New York since January 2002, so it is the place where I have spent most of my life. At this point, English is more accessible to me than Arabic. It comes easier because I use it every day. But I was born into a condition of diaspora. I was born in the Gulf. I was there for 14 years. Egypt is where I have spent the least amount of time in my life.

All of those things funnel me into a certain perspective and positionality. I’ve worked with first-generation Arab Americans and we’re different—we’re trying to tell the story of these places differently. In some ways, their access to their culture has been mitigated. There’s a local access that happens in the family home, or you may have it in the community around you, but otherwise, in most American immigrant households, it’s these tiny nuclear families that are still getting access to the stories of their cultures through imperialism and through American hegemony and American media. So the version of life that they’re often talking about when they talk about their cultures is a little bit Orientalized, and you can see that filter; mine is becoming more Orientalized as I have more distance from my culture. I can’t make a contemporary reference or joke if my entire life depended on it. For me to name a cultural meme from Egypt that’s big right now? I wouldn’t know. I’m not there. 

[I can’t be certain if Bazeed chose the word ‘Orientalize’ for the overtones expressed by Edward Said (1935-2003; Palestinian-American academic, literary critic, and political activist) in his 1978 book Orientalism (Pantheon Books), but it sounds as if they did. In Said’s terms, the word means to represent or portray cultures of the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa in a stereotyped way that emphasizes their exoticism and otherness, often reinforcing colonialist views of Western superiority.]

I would love to talk a little more about something that you just brought up, Bazeed, which is how time shifts your relationship to your own culture and the ways that you are writing about culture and place.

STEFANI: I write a lot about Hong Kong, but I didn’t used to. I remember in 2019, when the Hong Kong protests [15 March 2019-30 June 2020] started, a friend was like, “Have you written a play about it?” Which I was totally taken aback by, but then this friend said, “Well, you know, if you don’t write it, some British guy who’s never been to Hong Kong is going to write it.” So I wrote a play, and in the play Trump is mentioned because he was president back then. Because of that, because American politicians are mentioned, the play is relevant to America. There’s a relatability thing that I find to be very American. People often ask, “Would you do this play in Hong Kong?” And the thing is, if this play was done in Hong Kong, it would be done entirely in Cantonese. It would be a different play. People think because it’s multilingual, it’s globally applicable. That’s not true. If you put it in another place, it will become a different play. It has to.

FRANCISCO: I often feel like I’m existing in a world that asks me to be sure of who I am. My bio starts with my markers, and I am those markers: I am this sexuality and this race and this nationality, and this is what I’m bringing into the rehearsal room. I have a connection to Argentina, of course, but, as Bazeed was saying, ask me to pull up a meme and I won’t get it. I think the natural instinct is to feel shame about it, like I’m an imposter, and I feel like that shame has the potential to bring in a harshness about my identity—that I have to defend it. So I actively have to build for myself a flexibility that maybe the industry itself won’t necessarily permit. Maybe my experience and my nationality and my passport don’t endow me with an automatic authority to speak on everything that relates to my identity. I don’t want that for myself. There would have been a time where I would’ve felt ashamed of the distance that I’m acquiring from the culture that spawned me. But I don’t live there; I live here. There’s no shame about that. That’s just what it is. 

ARUN: A lot of the stuff that I’ve written is a period piece, now that Sri Lanka has a democratically elected, left-leaning socialist government. An extraordinary thing has happened in our lifetime, and only a few months ago. Finally! So I’m very conscious of the idea of becoming a diaspora writer who is constantly trapped in a vision of a country that you left rather than what that country is now. I’ve had moments back home where we thought we were in a better place, and the work did become sort of irrelevant, and then, five years later, it became relevant again. It is constantly moving, and your work is constantly shifting to both place and time. I think you can’t really escape that.

[Anura Kumara Dissanayake (b. 1968) was inaugurated on 23 September 2024 as the tenth President of Sri Lanka. He is the leader of the National People’s Power, a coalition of left-wing and progressive parties. Dissanayake, however, is, himself, a Marxist.]

KHRISTIÁN: I do think we have this capacity or this privilege or curse of trying to make sense of a thing without having to live it every day by virtue of being outsiders. Some of the environmental issues that are now happening in the U.S. have happened in my country for a long time. My family hasn’t had steady water in northern Guatemala City for over 10 years. I’m able to be here in the U.S. and take a break from not having steady water and write a play about it, which is for sure privilege. It’s also a way to reflect things back to these communities that we come from, and there’s pride in this. The NGO that I was working with to write my latest play, they were like, “Oh my God, you’re in New York, and you want to write a play about the forest fires in Guatemala?” It puts this expectation on the work. I just want to name that transnational tension and privilege and joy too, because it’s kind of cool that the work also gets to serve that.

[Guatemala experienced an alarming number of forest fires in April 2024 and a "state of calamity" was declared. By May, when the start of the rainy season extinguished most of the fires, over 157.5 square miles of land were affected.]

I’m thinking more lately about the use of theatre and performance in terms of writing place, and how that sense of place lives spatially in theatre; it unfolds and exists physically and in real time. How do you write non-American places into American theatre spaces, knowing that translation or mistranslation—cultural, linguistic, temporal—is inevitable?

STEFANI: When I picture plays in my head, it’s just a vacuum. And then I see things, and those things are usually influenced by where I’ve been. So a lot of plays are set in Hong Kong or Taiwan. They are murky, specific places, but a lot of it is influenced by how time is working with the landscape. I don’t really write linear plays, and I think that’s because I grew up watching and reading so much Taiwanese and Chinese stuff that is very nonlinear, very circular. I was reading this book about the colonization of time that talks a lot about how we think of colonialism as mostly a spatial thing. But it’s also a time thing. It’s not just about land; it’s also about how we perceive and experience time. Even the 24-hour clock or the calendar year are very superimposed Western things. That’s not to say it’s American. But I often feel that tension in how I think about storytelling relative to being in America; it almost feels like I’m trying to bring in a different experience of time into how we experience time in the U.S.

BAZEED: Surveillance is in almost every conversation I have these days. I think being strategic is part of this moment. Right now, I’m interested in erasure and allegory as form. What gets left out becomes part of the argument, not just the aesthetic. I think about Sheikh Imam’s protest songs from Egypt with all these veiled allegories like “They’re taking the milk from the cow” to talk about how the British were stealing our resources.

[Sheikk Imam, aka: El Sheikh Emam (1918-95) was a famous Egyptian composer and singer, known for his political songs in favor of the poor and the working classes. Britain controlled Egypt in one form or another from 1882 until 1956.]

STEFANI: I don’t identify as Asian American. I feel like I’m an Asian in America, but I didn’t grow up here. I have a different experience with language and storytelling. I find it really fascinating that so many playwrights try to use English in place of their native language, because I’m not interested in doing that at all. If the play is in Cantonese, I will be writing in Cantonese, or if the play is in Cantonese and English, then we’ll do half-and-half and you can read subtitles. I understand why people use English for access, but for me it feels like hearing the language is a huge part of experiencing the culture—just the environment of being in that language, what it brings out in people. Because people behave differently when they speak different languages.

ARUN: For me, the hardest thing about language is, like, a Sri Lankan sentence in English sort of has too many words in it for an American mouth. There’s a process I can see of an American actor getting used to it and finding their way into it, which is lovely. But the moment there’s a person who’s grown up in Sri Lanka in the room, and they read the lines—it’s like, Boom! Oh, right, I’ve forgotten what the ease was like.

FRANCISCO: Translation is not just about finding equivalents, but rather thinking, approaching a view of the world from a different perspective. Right? With theatre, in some ways it’s always a translation. I wrote something, and the people who are going to put it up will translate it to that time, to that moment, to who they are, to the resources that they have at hand, to the audience that they’re playing to. When we make a play from one country in another country—even a production that’s been transferred—none of us can have the same experience. There isn’t a complete encapsulation of the theatrical experience that can survive place and time. It’s just going to be completely different.

[Lyndsey Bourne is a Canadian writer, teacher, and doula (born and raised in North Vancouver and Penticton, British Columbia, in Canada’s far west) working with The Doula Project. Her plays include The Second Body (2020), Mabel’s Mine (2025), and I Was Unbecoming Then (2020).  She teaches playwriting at Playwrights Horizons Theater School (New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts).