FAREWELL, AND ERASE Will Open at The Clemente in May

Part documentary performance, part participatory theatre experiment, FAREWELL, AND ERASE transforms real interviews, cultural memory, and the afterlives of Farewell My Concubine into a multilingual theatrical encounter about identity, survival, and what remains in an age of erasure.

The New York premiere of FAREWELL, AND ERASE will be presented at The Clemente's Flamboyán Theater from May 1-3, 2026.

FAREWELL, AND ERASE is an original multilingual ethnodrama and participatory theatre work written and directed by Geboli Long and produced by JC Chang. Premiering in New York City in May 2026, the piece marks Long's first full-length original production presented in the city following her graduate studies in New York University's M.A. program in Theatre for Social and Civic Engagement.

Drawing on Chen Kaige's 1993 film Farewell My Concubine and Chen Peisi's 2025 film The Stage as its two key narrative threads, FAREWELL, AND ERASE is rooted in the complex afterlives of Chinese culture as it circulates across regions and generations in the era of globalization. Based on more than 50 hours of in-depth interviews conducted by Long with 30 interviewees across diverse professions, ages, and cultural backgrounds, the production distills the voices, memories, and lived experiences of 16 real individuals into the documentary core of the work.

At the center of the piece is the enduring cultural motif of Farewell My Concubine as a historical and emotional archetype that has reverberated across more than two millennia in China. Through the intersecting lenses of ancient history, Peking Opera, cinema, and contemporary memory, FAREWELL, AND ERASE examines how this iconic motif continues to be reactivated, revised, and projected onto present-day life. At the same time, drawing from the social and psychological worlds refracted through The Stage, the work explores structures of power, professional precarity, crises of faith, identity anxiety, mortality, and the absurdities of everyday survival. By placing personal experience, cultural memory, and the symptoms of the times on a single stage, FAREWELL, AND ERASE creates a polyphonic theatrical encounter that moves between realism and symbolism, the individual and the system, and history and the contemporary moment.

As an artist-researcher, Long approaches the writing and rehearsal process not simply as a means of production, but also as a living experiment and a form of civic action aimed at constructing participatory and public space. During the development of the work, Jürgen Habermas passed away. In an unexpectedly immediate way, his concepts of the "public sphere" and "communicative rationality" became an intellectual and ethical frame for the work as it seeks to ask, in real time, what forms of social and civic engagement theatre might still make possible in a technological age. In this sense, FAREWELL, AND ERASE is both a theatrical work and a civic proposition: a multilingual, cross-cultural performance that invites audiences to witness and participate in a shared process of interpretation, reflection, and public encounter.