silent letters.” As Tuan continued to explore her
interest in language, she wrote her first play, Last of
the Suns. The play, first produced by Berkeley Rep-
ertory Theater in 1995, was later revived at Ma-Yi
Theatre in New York City in 2003. After writing
Last of the Suns, Tuan attended Brown University,
where she earned an M.F.A. in Creative Writing in
1997, studying with playwright Paula Vogel and
novelist Robert Coover. At Brown, Tuan wrote
several plays: Ikebana, produced in Los Angeles at
East West Players in 1996; Some Asians, produced
at Perishable Theater in Providence, Rhode Is-
land, in 1997; mALL, produced at Cypress College
in 2000; and Coastline, a “virtual hypertext play”
produced by Serious Play! in Northampton, Mas-
sachusetts, in 2004. Tuan’s other important plays
include two works produced off-Broadway: Ajax
(por nobody), which premiered at the Flea Theater
in 2001, and The Roaring Girlie, which premiered
at the Foundry Theater in 2004. Ajax, which has
echoes of Euripides’ play The Bacchae, ironically
does not refer to Sophocles’ hero, but to the house-
hold cleanser by that name. The play explores the
notion of sex as a recreational activity and centers
on two women, Annette and Alma, who invite two
men, Alexander and Jesse, to their home for an
orgy. But rather than erotic titillation, the play is
concerned with human relations, as Tuan critiques
modern hedonism, along with its potential for
emptiness and excess. The Roaring Girlie, a free-
wheeling adaptation of a 1611 comedy by Thomas
Middleton and Thomas Dekker, centers on Mary
Frith, a pickpocket who dresses like a man and is
commonly known as Moll Cutpurse. Tuan uses
contemporary language to reveal the original
play’s relevance to the present, with its critique of
corruption and thirst for fame.
Tuan’s most famous work is Last of the Suns. In-
spired by the life of her own grandfather, who was
a lieutenant general in Chiang Kai-shek’s army,
Last of the Suns takes place on General Sun’s 100th
birthday as he negotiates memories from the past
and the burdens of contemporary family life. As
the general is haunted by two mythical Chinese
figures, Eight Pig and Monkey King, he thinks
back to his days of power, fighting off Commu-
nism and enjoying his patriarchal supremacy over
both his wife and his concubine. Another major
character is Twila, a figure skater apparently based
on Olympic silver and bronze medalist Michelle
Kwan. Twila, after a disappointing televised per-
formance where she falls several times, disappears
for five years. Her return home becomes the cata-
lyst for action in the play, as the rest of her family
is forced to confront not only her disappearance,
but also the buried family traumas of immigra-
tion, forced assimilation, and loss of their original
culture. Twila’s public failure as a figure skater al-
lows Tuan to explore several issues of concern to
the children of immigrants: the pressures placed
on young Asian Americans by their parents, the in-
equalities based on gender in Chinese culture, and
young women’s internalization of their mothers’
traumatic experiences of displacement.
Despite the various themes in her plays, Tu-
an’s plays share a few commonalities. Tuan, for
instance, tends to write with humor, even as she
delves into serious dissections of human relations
and politics. Tuan’s reliance on puns, wordplay,
and humorous situations lends a sense of irrev-
erence to her playwriting. Thematically speaking,
Tuan finds rich ground in the situation of women
in the 20th and 21st centuries; she not only exam-
ines their limited agency but also the possibility of
subverting gender roles. As part of a second-gen-
eration of Asian-American playwrights, Tuan de-
velops characters who are not necessarily defined
by their Asian background. They are “American” as
much as they are “Asian,” defining themselves in a
way that acknowledges their status as U.S. citizens
rather than foreigners. In terms of her use of lan-
guage, Tuan’s work evokes Absurdist Theater, espe-
cially Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, as well
as the theater of contemporary British dramatist
Caryl Churchill. Tuan’s dialogue tends to be lyrical
and poetic, relying sometimes on rhythmic non
sequitur, and repetitive phrasing that echoes hip-
hop and urban poetry jams. Aside from her work
as a playwright, Tuan is also known as a teacher
of writing. She has taught at the David Henry
Hwang’s Writers Institute in Los Angeles and at
the Michener Center for Writers at the University292 Tuan, Alice