What I write here is not really about The Words of Ants—I’ll let the play unravel itself. Instead, I would like to talk about theater, and more specifically, why I chose to be a playwright here and now, writing Chinese stories for the American stage at this very moment.

We seem to live in an increasingly divided world full of echo chambers, while our attention spans are torn apart by algorithms. Having experienced the shifting political climates and the transformation of online spaces in both the United States and China over the past decade, I am often unsettled by how easy it has become to hate rather than love people who seem different from us. As complex arguments give way to hashtag words and long videos lose their popularity to short reels, we seem to have less and less patience to engage in an elaborate discussion or to understand another human being just as complex as ourselves.

While I find it increasingly precarious to express myself in public and online, theater offers an intimate space for me to experiment with language and explore complex circumstances. I am not very interested in creating characters that are mere victims or villains, or characters whom my audience can immediately recognize and understand. Instead, I want to create characters who seem vastly different from my audience in terms of their social experiences and perceptions of the world. I believe there is something magical and deeply empowering in experiencing the journey of someone who seems different from us, and by the end of it coming to understand the circumstances that have shaped them.

Now, I would like to invite you to a world that may feel foreign to you, and I hope you’ll enjoy spending the next 90 minutes sharing the life experiences of my characters.

🐜 🐜 🐜

Xiaoyan