There is a line by Federico García Lorca that has followed me across my life in the theater: The poem, the song, the picture is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink — and in drinking, understand themselves.

I grew up the child of Chinese immigrants in Morgantown, West Virginia, raised in part by the rhythms of a restaurant kitchen. My mother fed people for a living, people hungry for food, for fellowship, for stories. Stories, in my family, were hard-fought-for things. Perhaps that’s why I grew so hungry for them. I’d hunt them down like so many threads, often broken, but the ones that held were taut and fertile. And somewhere along the way the theater became the place where I could bring them — not to resolve them, but to hold them up in the company of others.

The theater I believe in doesn’t begin with universality. It begins with plurality. The question isn’t how are we alike — it’s how are we different, and what does it cost us? But also: what does it make possible?