CHUANG Stage Announces the 2026–27 Season: Reclaiming the Epics

BOSTON - Sept. 3, 2026 - PRLog -- CHUANG Stage, Boston's Asian American theatre company, today announced its 2026–27 season, Reclaiming the Epics: two productions that take two of the most familiar stories ever told—the Ramayana and King Lear—and hand them to the women at their center. Across the season, CHUANG asks a single question: who gets to author the ending?

Both plays arrive, poignantly, as tributes. The season opens with The Sitayana (or "How to Make an Exit") by the acclaimed playwright Lavina Jadhwani (1983–2025), a Ramayana retelling devised through the eyes of the women at its heart. The season closes with Laowang, a play written for and originated by the legendary actor Wai Ching Ho (1943–2026). Laowang is coming to Boston from Alex Lin (a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree) following the play's world premiere at Primary Stages.

"There's a particular joy in taking a story you were raised on and turning it over in your hands," said Alison Yueming Qu, CHUANG Stage's Founder & Executive Director. "The classics handed us these towering — and often deeply patriarchal — structures, and adaptation lets us make a deep cut into them, ask who they were built to serve, and build a new world for those the original never made room for. It's how we ask questions about the cultures that shaped us and, in the same breath, make those epic stories our own. To begin with my icon Lavina Jadhwani's version of Sita, devised by a team of desi women, and celebrate with my dear friend Alex Lin's fearless, badass grandmothers — this is the season that Boston and American theatre needed."

Both productions will be staged at the Boston Center for the Arts, where CHUANG is a Launchpad Extension resident company—an ongoing partnership that follows the company's completion of the BCA's three-year Launchpad Residency. As a resident, CHUANG will present both shows in the BCA's Black Box and Plaza theatres, offered through the company's signature Pay-As-You-Are from $0 model to keep the work accessible across the community.