Today was the first day of rehearsal for Manhattan Theatre Club’s American premiere of Golden Shield, written by Anchuli Felicia King (White Pearl), with May Adrales (Vietgone at MTC) at the helm at MTC’s Creative Center in New York.
The ensemble includes Cindy Cheung, Fang Du, Kristen Hung, Daniel Jenkins, Michael C. Liu, Max Gordon Moore, Ruibo Qian and Gillian Saker.
From international playwright Anchuli Felicia King comes a riveting new play about loyalties, intrigue and the delicate art of translation. When enterprising American lawyer Julie Chen files a class-action lawsuit involving a multinational technology corporation and the Chinese government, she hires her strong-minded sister Eva as her translator. But what compromises will they make in order to win? And can they put aside their past differences to speak the same language? Directing this fast-paced production is May Adrales (Vietgone).
Golden Shield begins performances on Tuesday, April 26, 2022 ahead of a Tuesday, May 17, 2022 opening night at New York City Center – Stage I (131 West 55th Street).
The show’s creative team includes dots (scenic design), Sara Ryung Clement (costume design), Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew (lighting design), Charles Coes & Nathan A. Roberts (original music & sound design) and Alyssa K. Howard (production stage manager).
Major support for Golden Shield is provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation as part of The Sloan Initiative: Setting the Stage for Science and Technology. Additional support is provided by the Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
TICKETING INFORMATION
Tickets for Golden Shield can be purchased online at www.nycitycenter.org, by calling 212-581-1212, or by visiting the New York City Center box office (131 West 55th Street).
A special discount code ‘SHIELD’ is being offered for $35 tickets from 4/26 – 5/15 and $40 tickets from 5/18 – 6/12.
Manhattan Theatre Club is also having a special AAPI Night on Wednesday, May 4 at 7 PM. Click here to purchase tickets.
MTC SUBSCRIPTIONS AND PATRON MEMBERSHIPS
To join MTC’s season of plays as a Subscriber or a Patron, call the MTC Clubline at 212-399-3050 or go to www.manhattantheatreclub.com.
To sign up for MTC’s “30 Under 35” program, offering $30 tickets for theatregoers age 35 and under, visit www.manhattantheatreclub.com/30under35/.
HEALTH AND SAFETY INFORMATION
For update to date COVID protocols, go to www.manhattantheatreclub.com/protocols/.
BIOGRAPHIES
Cindy Cheung. Theatre: Tiny Beautiful Things (Long Wharf), Log Cabin, Iow@ (Playwrights Horizons), The Great Immensity (Civilians/Public), Middletown (Vineyard), The Seagull, Antigone (NAATCO), The Sugar House At The Edge Of The Wilderness (Ma-Yi), Sides: The Fear Is Real…(Ma-Yi/Miyagi). TV/Film includes: “The Sinner” (series regular), “The Flight Attendant,” “Billions,” “Awkwafina,” “Thirteen Reasons Why,” “High Maintenance,” “Bull,”“Blue Bloods,” “New Amsterdam,” “House of Cards,” Love Boat Taipei (upcoming), Mistress America, Obvious Child, The Light Of The Moon, Children of Invention, Lady In The Water. Member: Actors Center, AAPAC, The Civilians, E.S.T. MFA A.C.T.
Fang Du was born in Dandong, China. National Tour: Thoroughly Modern Millie. Off-Broadway: Golem (La Mama), Julius Caesar (CSC), Low Power (EST), Where Is My Maple Town (Theatre Row). Regional: Henry V (Arkansas Rep), Thoroughly Modern Millie (Fulton Theatre). Film: In A New York Minute, Tomorrow Comes Today, The Assistant. TV: Madam Secretary, The Blacklist, The Haves and The Have Nots, Mr. Robot, Two Sentence Horror Stories. Training: MFA Columbia University; BA, University of Virginia. Proud member of SAG-AFTRA. Always looking forward to the next travel destination with his wife and daughter! Love you, Mom!
Kristen Hung was born and raised in Taiwan. After acting in Taiwan for several years, she moved to New York to pursue acting career and now shuttles between US and Taiwan. Credits include TV: “High Maintenance”, “The Deuce”, “Mrs. Fletcher”, “Search Party”, “Orange Is The New Black”, “Bull”, “Jon Benjamin Has A Van”, and “Sunset Park”; Film: Bite, Last Call, Lucky Grandma, Front Cover, and In Transit; Theater: Buddhas Are Screaming In China, Turning The Glass Around, Peking Roulette, The Empress Dowager.
Daniel Jenkins Broadway: Oslo, Golden Boy, Billy Elliot, Mary Poppins, Wrong Mountain, Big, (Drama Desk nomination), Angels in America, Big River (2003/1985 Tony, DD noms). Recent Off-Broadway: Something Clean, Kid Victory, To Peter Pan…, Oslo, Stage Kiss, Paris Commune (Civilians Associate Artist), Love Child (co-written with Robert Stanton). Borrowed Cash (co-written with Melissa Van der Schyff); Composer/performer Feast Here Tonight. Film: For Robert Altman: O.C. And Stiggs, Tanner ’88, The Caine Mutiny Court Martial. Also, The Irishman, Cradle Will Rock, Glory, In Country, Five Corners. Recent TV: “City on a Hill”, “The Watcher”, “New Amsterdam”.
Michael C. Liu is thrilled to make his MTC debut with the amazing ensemble of Golden Shield! Michael has received critical acclaim as Anton Chekhov in I Take Your Hand in Mine, Robert in Betrayal, Dr. Luis Feldman in Duet for One, Robert in Proof, among other roles in Taiwan before performing in NYC with Ensemble Studio Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, Yangtze Repertory Theatre of America, and Kitchen Theatre Company. He is a Leadership Fellow of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals and has developed Cultural Understanding through the Arts (CUTA) workshops that benefit participants, both online and in-person, from across the globe. http://www.michaelcliu.org
Max Gordon Moore’s appearances on Broadway include The Nap and Saint Joan (MTC), Indecent and Relatively Speaking. Off-Broadway appearances include Man From Nebraska (Second Stage), Describe the Night (Atlantic Theatre), Coriolanus (The Public), The Master Builder (BAM), Mothers (Playwrights Realm), Man and Superman, It’s a Wonderful Life (Irish Rep). TV and Film appearances include Here Today, “Succession,” “NCIS: New Orleans,” “Instinct,” “Madam Secretary,” “The Good Wife.” Max is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and the Yale School of Drama.
Ruibo Qian. New York and regional credits include Becky Nurse of Salem (Berkeley Repertory), Fucking A (Signature), Bull in a China Shop (LCT3), The Great Leap (ACT), The Nether (San Francisco Playhouse), Tiger Style! (Alliance, Huntington Theatres), Water by the Spoonful (Old Globe), Henry IV, Part 1 (Pearl Theatre Company), and You for Me for You (Woolly Mammoth). Film and Television: “Black Mirror”, Manchester By the Sea, “The Sinner”, “EVIL”, “New Amsterdam”, “Living With Yourself”, “Broad City”, “The Good Fight”, “High Maintenance”, “Orange Is the New Black”, “Mozart in the Jungle”, and “Jessica Jones”. MFA, New York University Graduate Acting Program; BFA, Boston University’s College of Fine Arts. ruiboqian.com
Gillian Saker. Trained at the prestigious Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. Gillian Saker made her professional stage debut in The River at the Royal Court Theatre. She is a recipient of two Off West End nominations for her performances in tick tick boom (Park Theatre) and Othello (Riverside Studios). In the UK she is familiar to audiences from her series regular role on BBC’s Ripper Street and recurring roles on Misfits and Silent Witness. Now based in New York Gillian has had guest leads on “Ray Donovan”, “Bull”, “Fantasy Island”, “Leverage: Redemption” and an upcoming episode of “Chicago Med”.
Anchuli Felicia King (Playwright) is a playwright, screenwriter and multidisciplinary artist of Thai-Australian descent. Felicia’s plays have been produced by the Royal Court Theatre (London), Studio Theatre (Washington D.C.), American Shakespeare Center (Staunton), Melbourne Theatre Company (Melbourne), Sydney Theatre Company, National Theatre of Parramatta and Belvoir Theatre (Sydney). She is under commission with the Royal Court Theatre, the Manhattan Theatre Club, Atlantic Theatre Company, the Sydney Theatre Company and the Melbourne Theatre Company. Felicia is currently a screenwriter on “The Baby,” a dark horror comedy produced by Sister Pictures for HBO/Sky, “The Twelve,” a trial drama for the Foxtel Group and “Deadloch,” a noir comedy and Amazon original series. She is also writing on TV projects in development for HBO, A24, AMC, Sister Pictures, BBC Studios, Warner Bros, Amazon, Netflix, Easy Tiger, Lucky Chap Entertainment, Hoodlum Entertainment and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
May Adrales (Director) is a director, artistic leader, teacher and mother; she has directed over 25 world premieres. Her work has been seen most recently at Second Stage (Rajiv Joseph’s Letters of Suresh), Manhattan Theater Club (Qui Nguyen’s Vietgone), Signature Theater, Lincoln Center, The Public Theater, WP, New York Theater Workshop, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Seattle Rep, Milwaukee Rep and South Coast Rep. She was awarded the prestigious Ammerman Award at Arena Stage and Theater Communications Group’s Alan Schneider award for freelance directors. She is a Drama League Directing Fellow, Van Lier Directing Fellow, WP Lab Director, SoHo Rep Writers/Directors Lab and New York Theater Workshop directing fellow, TCG New Generations Grantee, SDC Denham Fellowship and PaulGreen Directing Award. She served as an Associate Artistic Director at Milwaukee Rep; Artistic Associate at The Playwrights Center; Artistic Associate at The Public Theater; and Director of Artistic Programs and Artistic Director at The Lark. She serves on the board of Theater Communications Group. May has directed and taught at Juilliard, Harvard/ART, ACT, Fordham, NYU and Bard College. She is currenting the Director of the Theatre Program and Assistant Professor at Fordham University. May has served on faculty at the Yale School of Drama and Brown/Trinity MFA program. MFA, Yale School of Drama. (www.mayadrales.net)
MANHATTAN THEATRE CLUB, under the leadership of Artistic Director Lynne Meadow and Executive Producer Barry Grove, has become one of the country’s most prominent and prestigious theatre companies. Over more than four decades, MTC productions have earned numerous awards including 7 Pulitzer Prizes, 27 Tony Awards, 40 Drama Desk Awards and 49 Obie Awards. MTC has a Broadway home at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre (261 West 47th Street) and two Off-Broadway theatres at New York City Center (131 West 55th Street). For more information on MTC, please visit www.ManhattanTheatreClub.com.
Manhattan Theatre Club is committed to being an anti-racist organization that respects and honors all voices while upholding the values of community, equity, access, and belonging. We understand that the United States is a country founded on white supremacy and anti-Blackness, and that these belief systems are tightly woven throughout American arts and culture. We recognize MTC’s place within that history, and understand that uprooting biases requires ongoing work. To this end, we have been reviewing, and are continuing to review, our policies and practices in order to create an inclusive, anti-racist environment for our artists, staff members, and audiences. We wish to express solidarity with and gratitude towards those from historically oppressed communities whose voices have raised consciousness and encouraged action. We will continue to post regular progress reports on our website at manhattantheatreclub.com/edi.
Broadwayworld.com: Photos: American Premiere of GOLDEN SHIELD Begins Rehearsals at MTC
Lia Chang is a Chinese-American actor, a multi-media content producer, an award-winning filmmaker, and a photo activist and documentarian, who lifts up and amplifies BIPOC communities and artists and the institutions that support them.
Lia moved to New York from her home in San Francisco when she was 17 years of age and made her stage debut as Liat in a national tour of South Pacific with Barbara Eden and Robert Goulet. She spent many years working extensively Off-Broadway, including Signature Theatre’s revival of Sam Shepard’s Chicago. Her film work includes Wolf, New Jack City, A Kiss Before Dying, King of New York, Big Trouble in Little China, and The Last Dragon. The decades of being viewed by others through the narrow lens of “Asian actor” in the industry brought Lia to a turning point, and she picked up her camera, determined to create awareness by documenting the work and the lives of her BIPOC colleagues, resulting in the creation of thousands of photographs and pieces of video. Her photo archives are housed in the AAPI collection in the Library of Congress’ Asian Reading Room under “Lia Chang Theater Portfolio collection,1989-2011” and in the “Lia Chang Photography Collection” in The Billy Rose Theatre Division of the New York Public Library.
Lia’s awards include the 2000 OCA Chinese American Journalist Award and the 2001 AAJA National Award for New Media. She is also an AAJA Executive Leadership Graduate, a Western Knight Fellow at USC’s Annenberg College of Communications for Specialized Journalism on Entertainment Journalism in the Digital Age, a National Press Photographers Association Visual Edge/Visual Journalism Fellow at the Poynter Institute for New Media, and a Scripps Howard New Media Fellow at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
More recently, Lia co-founded Bev’s Girl Films, which makes films that foster inclusion and diversity on both sides of the camera. She executive produced and starred in the indie films Hide and Seek (AA Film Lab’s 2015 72 Hour Shootout Best Actress Nomination), Rom-Com Gone Wrong, and When the World Was Young (2021 DisOrient Film Audience Choice Award for Best Short Narrative).
A retrospective of Lia’s photographs will be on view at the Museum of the City of New York later this year, documenting her BIPOC colleagues and contemporaries in the performing arts, which will include photos of Prospect Theater Company artists at work. www.liachang.com, www.liachangphotography.com
Backstage Pass with Lia Chang 