Video: Watch a Trailer for Kristina Wong's SWEATSHOP OVERLORD, Coming to A.C.T. This Month
Performances begin on Saturday, March 30.
Watch a trailer for Kristina Wong’s award–winning solo show, Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord, at A.C.T.’s Strand Theater beginning Saturday, March 30 and running through Sunday, May 5, 2024.
On Day 3 of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kristina Wong began sewing masks out of old bedsheets and bra straps on her Hello Kitty sewing machine. Before long, she was leading the Auntie Sewing Squad, a work-from-home sweatshop of hundreds of volunteers—including children and her own mother—to fix the U.S. public health care system while in quarantine. It was a feminist care utopia forming in the midst of crisis. Or was it a mutual aid doomsday cult? The answer to that question is something you’ll have to decide for yourself as Kristina takes you through this capital-H-Hilarious journey in this Pulitzer Prize finalist play.
“I am thrilled to welcome Kristina Wong home,” said Tony Award winner and A.C.T. Artistic Director Pam MacKinnon. “She is a true citizen artist, back in San Francisco to share her moving, irreverent, funny, and true story of taking an action. I am excited to reunite her with her Bay Area aunties who made a difference.”
“One of the biggest compliments I get is when people see my work and tell me ‘you rep for the Bay,’” said Wong. “San Francisco has cradled three generations of my family, it's the city where we forged our American Dreams. This is a homecoming in so many ways. San Francisco is where my mother rounded up her base of friends to sew masks remotely for the Auntie Sewing Squad. It's a large hub of where our Aunties who were strangers to each other in the early pandemic realized our mutual aid efforts and later became good friends. I can't wait to be sharing this story with the Aunties who lived it, with the people who benefited from it, with all of us who survived this moment of history. I can't wait to share this community of Aunties I accidentally brought together who represent a greater hope that is possible. I came of age in San Francisco. Living a characteristically Chinese American double life—aspiring to be a super high achieving strait laced good girl while so many other multiverse temptations sputtered around me. One of those temptations, which I would eventually succumb to, was a life of making performance as my living. As a high school theater kid, A.C.T. was that gold standard of theater, and to play this stage now, sharing this story, feels nothing short of a miracle.”
Written and performed by Kristina Wong, the creative team for Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord includes Chay Yew (Director), Junghyun Georgia Lee (Scenic Design), Linda Cho (Costume Design), Amith Chandrashaker (Lighting Design), Mikhail Fiksel and Adam Salberg (Sound Design), Caite Hevner (Projection Design), Megan McClintock (Stage Manager), Christina Hogan (Assistant Stage Manager).
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