FALL REP FESTIVAL to Open at Boston Playwrights' Theatre

Boston Playwrights' Theatre will present its “Fall Rep Festival,” featuring two new plays running in repertory November 5 through 22 at 949 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston: Yide Cai's “White Phoenix,” directed by Dmitry Troyanovsky, and Rachel Beth Greene's “Jessica of Venice,” directed by Josh Glenn-Kayden. The pairing brings together two distinct worlds: a Chinese family torn apart across an ocean, and an Orthodox Jewish community set in the present day. Performed on the same stage, the two plays ask a shared question: what is the cost of crossing the distance between two worlds?

White Phoenix

Told by just two actors, “White Phoenix” is a sweeping family drama that unfolds across decades and continents. The play follows a Chinese orphan who vows to find the sister he lost, tracing his path to adulthood in China alongside a dangerous entanglement with the daughter of a powerful political family. Meanwhile, his sister comes of age an ocean away, adopted into a prominent American senatorial family and drawn into a secret romance of her own. As their two stories finally converge, the siblings' long-awaited reunion becomes a mirror for the fraught, complicated relationship between their two countries.

Cai, whose writing draws on classical Chinese drama, particularly “The Peony Pavilion,” built the epic for a cast of two on purpose. “The audience will serve as witness to the effort of two actors embodying four distinct, almost opposite characters,” he says. “It's this magic of making something out of nothing. That's what's always special about theater: the imagination. Even though the two siblings spend the entire play trying to find each other, the two actors playing them are together on stage the whole time.”

Jessica of Venice

Set in the present day but steeped in Early Modern echoes, “Jessica of Venice” follows a group of Orthodox Jewish schoolgirls who discover a banned copy of Shakespeare's “The Merchant of Venice” and become fascinated by its rebellious runaway daughter. For one restless teen caught between her tight-knit community and a budding crush outside it, the discovery starts to blur the line between the story on the page and the life she's beginning to imagine for herself.

Staged side by side, the two plays speak to each other. “A theme we have discovered that runs between our stories is the idea of characters who inhabit two separate worlds, and the yearning to reach through the space between them,” says Greene. For Cai, the pairing points to a shared warning: “Heaven is in the making, in the everyday life we already have, with the people already around us. The moment we idolize or covet an elsewhere, or an 'other,' we create our own downfall.”