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About the Play: Scripted as a series of stylized scenes for five voices, Chay Yew's Porcelain is a compelling, graphic, gritty "voice play" that is as physically austere as it is verbally rich.

As Porcelain explores the twin issues of begin ethnic in a white world and gay in a straight one, the alienation John Lee feels explodes in a murder committed in the struggle to find human connection.

Porcelain carefully sculpts a world of fragmented characters and complex circumstances, where a crime of passion unravels with tremendous insight.

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Concept Summary: Faces and voices emerge in isolation to tell John Lee's story through fragmented dialogue. The lighting mimics this structure, establishing the rapid pace and orchestrating movements onstage. Small pools of light in a tight color palette frame each character's space. the poetic narration of the murder is accompanied by a gradual but intense shift to deep, heavily textured reds, spilling outward from John Lee's cell to encompass the entire playing space. The metaphoric fable of the crow and sparrow employs a far more illustrative style of light, in contrast to John Lee's tragically real situation.

Porcelain Light Plot
Porcelain Light Plot
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About the Playwright / Background Information Banned in his native Singapore, Chay Yew has been hailed as "a promising new voice in American Theater" by Time magazine. Porcelain is an examination of a young man's crime of passion. Triply scorned as an Asian, a homosexual, and now a murderer, 19-year-old John Lee has confessed to shooting his lover in a public lavatory in London. A winner of the London Fringe Award for Best Play, Porcelain dissects the crime through a prism of conflicting voices: newscasts, flashbacks, and John's recollections to a prison psychiatrist.


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