lacuna at Belvoir Street Theatre

Claudia is jobless, cashless and flailing. Doomscrolling in the dark, ignoring emails from Centrelink, she wallows in the aftermath of an earth-shattering fight with her Mum. Why can’t Claudia just get a job like a good Chinese daughter?

So, Claudia is delighted when a plum job opportunity falls right into her lap. Location: The underworld. Employer: Meng Po, the Goddess of Oblivion. Job Description: Erasing memories from the living. Salary: Negotiable. The hours are weird and there’s no option to work from home, but Claudia is happy to be diversity-hired if it gets her mind off things. And she soon discovers an unexpected side-perk: secretly tampering with the memories of her friends and family. Just small scrubs, at first. The time her skirt got stuck in an escalator. The time she said “rizz” in front of a Gen Alpha. But when a mortal meddles with the sacred, the consequences can be severe.

Playwright Eric Jiang and director Nicole Pingon join forces for an epic underworld dive into family, forgetting and the dire consequences of commodifying the divine.