Dakota Ratliff, Johanna Nchekwube, Kelsey Milbourn with director Gabrielle Kurlander star in ‘This Time,’ by playwright Brian Dang, center,
at Undermain Theatre. (Photo by Paul Semrad)
Dang it
Undermain workshops a new queer play by nonbinary playwright Brian Dang
RICH LOPEZ | Staff writer
rich@dallasvoice.com
In 2022, Brian Dang received the Katherine Owens/Undermain Fund for New Work grant for their play This Time. Now, Dang is seeing their work come to life as Undermain Theater is currently in rehearsals for the premiere of the workshop production.
The work will be presented on Feb. 29-March 3 as part of the Undermain Workshop Series where the company fosters and cultivates new, unproduced works.
Seeing their show become reality has been an exciting time for the now-Rhode Island based playwright. “I haven’t had that many full productions done of my work, so this is a huge deal for me and very special,” Dang said.
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‘This Time’
Written by Brian Dang
Directed by Gabrielle Kurlander
Cast
Kelsey Milbourn
Johanna Nchekwube
Dakota Ratliff
Scenic Designer: Robert Winn
Lighting Designer: Steve Woods
Costume and Properties Designer: Bernetta Sowels
Sound Designers and Music Composition: Michael Walsh and David Belmont with Premik Russell Tubbs
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Being a workshop, the Undermain isn’t just bringing the show to life. This path, rather, will allow it to live in perpetuity.
“In the way Bruce described it, this incentivizes the play to live on, so rather than premiering it, this will allow the play to be premiered by another theater and then live on from there,” Dang said. “So this is becoming a reality in that way is really unprecedented for me.”
Bruce Dubose is the producing artistic director of Undermain, and Katherine Owens, who passed in 2019, was the founding AD of Undermain. This fund, created in her honor, lets her legacy live on in a way that gives regard to “poetic and language-driven work,” as Dang described it. Dubose sought out Dang’s work, leading to them being named recipient of the $10,000 grant.
“What a big honor to be part of [Owens’] legacy,” Dang said. “Undermain has this rich archive of experimental, groundbreaking work. That speaks a lot to me, and I look up to that as a writer.”
Dang, a Vietnamese/Chinese playwright, was based in Seattle where they worked as a poet and teacher. Now they live in Providence, R.I., where they just started an MFA program. Per Dang’s bio from Undermain, they see writing as an act of envisioning an eventual communing, an opportunity to freeze time as we know it, and a reaching for joy.
Appropriately enough, Dang says time is a huge theme with this work, which is also replete with queer undertones.
About This Time from Undermain:
“Jane, Hester and Peregrine work as maids in a 1900s manor in the valley of the Yeti. Unable to say what they want to say, stealing moments away from work to hold time with each other, their love bubbles under their words. We hear their thoughts they aren’t yet brave enough to tell each other.
Jane holds a knife. It’s bloody. Hester lies on a table. She’s bloodied. Peregrine blows out a candle. Go back in time. They can’t stop thinking of death. We hurtle towards it.”
Dang describes the play as a sort of examination of time set within a queer love story.
“These three femme leads, they find refuge in each other, and for the three of them to love each other so deeply, they did not have to limit themselves and operated in this sapphic queer time that allowed them to discover things,” they said.
“Plus, I’ve written this gay, queer yearning they all have, and their inner thoughts are spoken dialogue, so the audience all hears their desires where the other characters cannot.”
Dang goes on to say that these femmes aren’t conflicted with insecurities in their desires, but rather over whether they can express such in their current circumstances. This all leads back to the title of the show.
This Time is styled specifically, they said.
“I put the emphasis on ‘This’ because there is much more about the engagement of this moment. I wanted to give a much more poetic approach to stylizing the title with that emphasis,” they said.
As a nonbinary/trans femme artist, all of their works have some queer aspect to them — but always with a thoughtful process.
“I am exploring this radical openness in my plays — especially about queer people — but I also feel like I have no business dictating the entire queer experience from my own perspective. So I find it more interesting to allow actors and teams to build that together. This helps me with the way I like to express and explore queerness in my work.”
For tickets, visit Undermain.org.
