Big Dawg Productions presents the Wilmington premiere of THE CHINESE LADY, featuring Star-News Theatre Award winners Mirla Criste and Chad Hsu. Wilmington's first stage play with an all-Asian cast, this beautiful play speaks to the impact of America's hidden past, current moment and hopeful future.

Inspired by a true story, 14-year-old Afong May is brought to America in 1834, the first Chinese woman to set foot on U.S. soil. She is put on display for the paying public, who are mesmerized by her exotic ways, and unnerved by her bound feet. As the decades wear on, her celebrated sideshow comes to define and challenge her very sense of identity. The Chinese Lady is a dark, poetic, yet whimsical portrait of America, unearthing our hidden history with humor and insight.

“…piercing and intimate…this quiet play steadily deepens in complexity as we trail the idealistic Afong and the more knowing Atung through the decades…by the end of Mr. Suh’s extraordinary play, we look at Afong and see whole centuries of American history” — The New York Times.

“I can’t express enough the importance and historical reverence of this show” — Broadway World