show no. 50

a hasty post celebrating theatre

I’m writing this at my desk in my apartment, having just got home from playing keys for Instant Noodles, a 24-hour Asian-American play festival here in Seattle. I’ve just put my laundry in the washer, and I’m hoping to finish this post before I have to move it to the dryer—but we’ll see it goes.

Instant Noodles comprised my 49th and 50th theatre performances since September 2019, when I first started college. Since I am ultimately a nerd at heart (quelle surprise), I have a pretty specific definition of what I mean by performance—I have to have been at that specific show in a capacity that required me to be there. These fifty performances have come across some twenty-one productions: I’ve read stage directions; played violin and keyboard and percussion; conducted orchestras; run subtitles; written and translated plays… I’ve even acted before, weirdly enough. It’s been such an incredible run, frankly, and it’s one of those weird activities I don’t think I could’ve ever imagined myself ever getting into before I actually did it.

I’ve been trying to think of why I love theatre so much, why I keep playing in shows, why I keep going to them—I’ve also seen some 78 performances since that time—and as I’ve thought about it more, I’ve found myself drawn to this idea of attention. How often do hundreds of people turn their attention to the same thing, in the same space, at once? How often does that attention go uninterrupted for an hour or more? The liveness makes each moment a rare and precious thing; if you look away, if you blink, you’ll miss something, and you will never get it back. Even if you see the show again, that moment will be different. Everything matters so much.¹

I think that preciousness also forces us to be open to emotions, in a way that feels deeply important to me, especially now. Somewhere along the path of college, I socialized this idea that getting out of MIT meant I would have more free time, and therefore I could do more creative things; that I could have the weekends to just sit around and write and do nothing else. And, while the “more free time” thing might be true, I think I underestimated just how much focusing on one thing for so long each day—i.e., work—reduces the variety of life in a way that also reduces the highs and lows of one’s emotional experience. I loved being able to jump from subject to subject at college, taking biochemistry and choir and playwriting and computer systems all at the same time²; if I ever got tired of one thing, I could jump to the next and not get bored. There was so much more happening. More bad things, too; more stress and depression and anxiety, more hassle and more mess. But, more.

By contrast, I think the past few months of work have been very… level. To be clear, I’m not complaining, exactly: I really quite like my job, I feel like I’m having a lot of impact there; I’m in a choir, I’m in an orchestra, I’ve read more books than I probably did in all of my first three years of college, etc.. But, I don’t feel like I am feeling anything all that strongly, nothing that good, nothing that bad. Everything—every day—is just kind of… samey. There’s a line in Next to Normal, where Diana, a character with bipolar disorder goes, “I don’t feel anything at all,” and the psychopharmacologist responds, “patient stable.” That’s kind of how I feel right now.

I’m sure this is an experience that is not uncommon, and I am also sure that this is an experience that is unpleasant for many people. As someone who wants to write, though, it is for all intents and purposes a death sentence. I don’t think I’ve had a good idea for a poem in months; I might’ve written three or four things since last August, when I used to write a poem every week and feel good about it. I haven’t touched the play I wrote last spring for Playwrights’ Lab since August, even though I really do believe it’s something that’s worth trying to push further. It’s so hard to write when nothing new is happening; it’s like asking a bug whose spent its life in a bottle to describe anything outside the bottle. It’s hopeless.

Part of this is probably my own fault. I have always been kind of shy or, more precisely, closed off; I am not interested in divulging details of my life to people who do not necessarily need to know them, which is deeply ironic as someone who is currently writing a blog post, but well, that’s different, or something. And so, as I’ve settled in in Seattle, it’s been hard to motivate myself to actually make friends or talk to people in any sort of depth, all of which is to say—yes, I should probably go out more, but I tend to fit more into the quiet, hermit lineage of writers than I’d like to admit, which is also hampering my ability to write.

Anyways, where was I? Ah yes. Theatre.

I think this weekend was the most alive I’ve felt in months, and it reminded me why I love theatre so much. We got together at 7:30 PM on Friday, met, picked a theme (“What do you mean by Asian?”), and then the band went off and jammed for an hour or two, where I wrote a bunch of lyrics for an opening song, and then we went home (and I wrote more lyrics for an intermission song). We showed up at 9 AM on Saturday, set up all of our equipment, went and asked each of the seven plays what kind of music and sound cues they wanted, came back together, picked specific cuts of songs based on that feedback, and then ran it once before teching everything. Then, very quickly, it was 7:30 PM on Saturday, and we did the show, and that was show one. We came back today (Sunday) at 12:30 PM, did the show at 2 PM, and then hung out for a while, after which I lugged my keyboard and keyboard stand back home via the light rail.

my view for the show

I am, by all accounts, not an incredible musician. At this point, between my rusting violin skills and my slowly de-rusting piano skills, almost any reasonably good high school musician you could find would be better than me at either instrument. This is not a humbleness thing or an impostor syndrome thing; it is just something that happens to be true about the state of my skills. Playing music for theatre is hard—there is a lot riding on the pianist—and so a natural question arises for me of “Why me? Should I be the one to be doing this?”

The thing about theatre that allows me to get back that mental block is that it is fundamentally about imagination. It is about being willing to take risks and do something outside of your comfort zone, to imagine yourself in someone else’s story and to say “what would I do?” and “how will I overcome this?” I think there’s something egalitarian about that promise: we’re telling stories that no one’s told before, we’re imagining things that can’t possibly be. And so who’s to say I can’t be a keyboardist, or a conductor, or a songwriter, so long as I show up and do the work? We are already in the business of imagining ourselves as other people.

I think that freedom has given me a lot over the years; it’s forced me to step outside my comfort zone and learn to do new things. I remember how terrified I was when I first conducted in Heathers, or when I wrote and helped direct Remembering Her. Each time, I just showed up and did the work, and there were rough spots, but I learned so much, and at the end of the day we had a show. Each new show brings new things to learn, whether it be piano-conducting or how, exactly, to reduce the impossible scores they give pianists on Broadway.

For me, this weekend was that freedom turned up to eleven. I have literally never done anything like this before, and the environment challenged me in ways I didn’t even know I was going to face. I learned I was capable of writing lyrics, I learned I was actually capable of playing chords (mostly) and even adding a tiny bit of variance for flair—although there is a lot more learning to be done on that front. I got to practice my ability to time jokes in the forms of sound cues, got to practice just being in time with four other people, got to watch actors rehearse and lighting designers program and so on and so forth. I got to perform for more people at once than I think I’ve ever performed for before. Being musically “on” for 12+ hours on Saturday was certainly a challenge, but it was good to know, as ever, that it was possible.

The twenty-four-hour aspect also brought out one of my other favorite things about theatre: its ephemerality. The moment-by-moment nature forces to you be vulnerable; if you make a mistake, there is no going back to fix it. The most important thing is that you are adaptable, that you can keep moving forwards, that you roll with the punches, and that’s something that calls to me, in some weird way. I love sitting there at the keyboard, looking for the next cue, the next chord, paying close attention, knowing what’s next, hitting it at just the right time. It’s one of the most challenging parts of live theatre—I don’t want to talk about how many times I’ve missed a cue, or exited a vamp catastrophically—but it is also one of my favorites. It keeps me from searching for perfection in a way that filming or recording doesn’t; it forces me to say something and move on, instead of just keeping it in forever, trying to make a piece of art better or more clear.

Twenty-two has been an incredibly weird age. I think there’s something undersold about how strange it is to go from contexts where you are mostly with people your own age (or younger, as an upperclassman) to contexts where you are suddenly the youngest person again. It’s been hard for me to feel like I have anything to add to conversations yet, as product of my newness to life, and yet it is also cool to know that there really is so much more to learn and to experience. This weekend, I got to work with a bunch of incredible people; so many incredibly funny actors and talented directors and playwrights who I wish I got to see more of (but alas, we are all hermits), and, of course, I got to play with a very delightful band where everybody kind of just vibed. It was also, of course, especially, nice to do that with other Asian-American artists, to try and get together and make intentionally Asian art—it’s something that I haven’t gotten to do that often, and it made that “forward-looking” especially poignant, in that—yeah, I’ll get to grow old, and be Asian, and keep making art, if I want to. If I keep going.

In summary, I’m very grateful to have gotten to do this, and I’m filled with something again—a vitality, if you will—and maybe life will keep draining it away, but we will beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

So, yeah, show number fifty.³ Here’s to fifty more.

1. Incidentally, this is also what I think I like about watching soccer games. Like, yeah, the Seattle Sounders are okay, and MLS as a whole is not the best soccer you could watch, but it’s just so nice to be in a space, live, watching people play, knowing any play and therefore any moment could be crucial.

2. A real semester I did, along with poetry and machine learning.

3. Okay, so I did have to start the dryer load, but I got pretty damn close.

Here are some statistics, because I love statistics. Of the fifty performances, I’ve done:

• Orchestra directed (fourteen performances, including three piano-conducted)

• Violin (ten performances)

• Played keys (six other performances)

• Managed subtitles (five performances)

• Wrote the play (five performances)

• Read stage directions (three performances)

• Acted (three performances)

• Played percussion (three performances)

• Translated (one performance)

These performances have been in 2019 (5), 2022 (9), 2023 (19), 2024 (15), and 2025 (2).

I’ve also seen seventy-eight performances, including musicals (30), operas (5), plays (34), and staged readings (6), across 2019 (2), 2020 (2), 2021 (1), 2022 (16), 2023 (24), 2024 (25), and 2025 (8).