MADE IN AMERICA? By Yide Cai to Premiere at PlayGround's 2025 Free-Play Festival
The festival runs August 13-16 at Potrero Stage.
By: Emmy Rice Aug. 09, 2025
This August, PlayGround will present the West Coast premiere of Made in America?, a bold new solo play by award-winning playwright Yide Cai, as part of the 2025 Free-Play Festival. The festival runs August 13-16 at Potrero Stage (1695 18th St, San Francisco) and online, featuring six dynamic new works.
Performance Dates are Thursday, August 14 at 6:00 PM, Friday, August 15 at 8:00 PM, and Saturday, August 16 at 4:00 PM.
In Made in America?, museum curator Andreas delivers a gripping monologue about a single brick-the last ever made in America-now an art piece by Chinese artist Terence Cao. As Andreas traces the brick's history, it becomes a prism for industrial decline, political irony, and personal loss, tied to Cao's father, who died under the very bricks he produced. Blurring the lines between art, capitalism, and activism, Andreas exposes his own entanglement in the story and urges the audience to intervene in an espionage investigation, transforming a museum tour into an urgent call to action.
Written and performed by Yide Cai, a trilingual playwright from Shenzhen, China and MFA Playwriting candidate at Boston University, Made in America? fuses personal narrative with global political currents, asking: when an artifact carries the weight of history, who owns its meaning?
About PlayGround's Free-Play Festival:
The Free-Play Festival is PlayGround's annual celebration of bold, risk-taking works by emerging and established voices, offered entirely admission-free to expand access to new theater. The 2025 lineup spans from an intimate solo performance to a multimedia experiment.
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