I started writing LAST SHIP TO PROXIMA CENTAURI in 2017, back when the intentionally horrific conditions of refugee migrants detained along the border was the issue of the moment. I am an American of Chinese descent, so much so that I only speak Dim Sum and Mah Jong Chinese, if I'm being honest. The experience of the detained migrants is obviously far away from my life, and yet part of me couldn't help imagining myself in that situation. Being an American who is not in the white majority means being constantly aware that it could be taken away. The freedoms, the privileges, the belonging in this country … all the nice great things that we learned about in our school Social Studies classes. Will they be there for me after a few bad election cycles and an unlucky crisis event or two?

Have you ever had thoughts about that? If not, consider yourself lucky.

While I wanted to write something about the feelings brought about by the situation at the border, what right would I possibly have to do so? How would I write about such a thing that wouldn't seem abjectly ridiculous on its face?

The answer, of course, is science fiction.

I may be biased but for my money, no genre is as adept at being able to talk about issues in ways that circumvent the usual defenses that a reader or audience member would have than science fiction. From pop approaches like many Star Trek episodes and X-Men's extended race allegory, to Dune's examination of political uprising, sci-fi has long been a home for work that can be both trenchant in its ruminations and … just plain fun. Sexy blue women! Mutant powers! Sand worms! But also, an extended analogy about the rise of fascism, on the down low.

This is an analysis that I have applied in hindsight to my play. To start, I just wanted to write a narrative about Americans being put in the same situations as the detained migrants. I imagined a ship carrying a payload of Americans in stasis, passengers on a re-settlement vessel that has traveled for thousands of years to the nearest inhabitable planet. The two pilots, the only beings awake on the vessel, make contact with the inhabitants of the colony of Earth expatriates who now live there. Their long-anticipated journey has been redeemed! And yet … And yet …

What if?

(The great defining principle of sci-fi, those two words: What if?)

What if … the people on the planet, the ones there already, the ones that vastly outnumber the people on the ship …

What if they don't want you there?

Because

Because of your skin color.

Because of your politics.

Because of the things people did in your country's name. Back in the old place. Even if it's 2,000 years ago? Even if it has nothing to do with you?

WTF do you do now?

Sorry to spoil the plot of my own play, which you should totally buy, read, and produce, but that takes you into the second act, where you will meet the inhabitants of the planet, and figure out exactly why they might not quite want to welcome a spaceship full of 100,000 Americans to their teeming shore. If this seems like a heavy topic, like it's a bit much, well it kind of is, but also it's kind of gloriously silly. In my view, the joy of science fiction is getting to create your own world and populating it with the most batshit stuff you can think of. You get to say what of our entire culture and history is remembered by history if history is written by … well, not us. What if history is written by our frenemies?

As a result, in this play we got Game of Thrones and Frasier jokes, we have a wacked-out nursery rhyme that explains the settlers' origins. Jokes about China's love of bureaucracy. Tarantino movies being studied in universities in the "Classics" department. There's a silly infomercial I stuck in the middle for the hell of it. Starbucks coffee is a major plot point, and I paid three translators to help create the full canvas of the scope of what this brave new world should be. And I've become the second Reed College graduate playwright to write a post-apocalyptic play that references The Simpsons. (Shoutout Anne Washburn.)

This play is fun. And it may give you nightmares. It's easier for me to imagine reaching another planet than it is for me to imagine evolving past the horrid bullshit we are currently mired in. I write this on the eve of the 2024 elections, and I want for this play to feel much less relevant in six months than it does now. (You'll understand when you read it.) I hope the play causes arguments between couples going to see the show, as they realize their partner identifies more with other characters than they expected (ones that they assumed were the villains). And also, your favorite set and costume designer that you know secretly would love to work on wacky space opera stuff. When this play debuted on stage at Portland Stage Co., I have never met a backstage group more enthused than the people I met there at getting to build spaceship and costume "aliens." "We've been looking forward to this all season!" I was told more than once. Science fiction has dominated other media for some time now for a reason.

And lastly, the Portland Stage production brought about the best, most cherished bit of feedback I've ever received from something I've written. More than any good review I've so far received in any publication, a teacher wrote in to Portland Stage after bringing their class to a student matinee. That teacher wrote: "Of all the many plays I've seen with students over the years, this one has sparked the most lively discussion — over lunch afterward, on the bus home, in class, and online. Everyone was impressed by the quality of the production, which is something we've come to expect from Portland Stage, but the ideas and conflicts embedded in this particular show make for a particularly rich 'text' to explore in conversation."

I hope you might feel the same way, too. With respect, I invite you to come aboard … LAST SHIP TO PROXIMA CENTAURI.

Mysteries and thrillers are amazingly malleable forms in which to write for the stage in that you can tell a good story, a good yarn as it were, and then subvert that story to your own serious ends … whatever they may be. If you do it right, your audience will latch on to the tale and stay with you. But along the way you can take them somewhere they might not ordinarily go and even give them something to ruminate on the next day.

With BLISSFIELD, I knew that I wanted to write a small-town conspiracy play that would focus on a circle of people who had been friends since high school, but were now facing middle age and dealing with mortgages, marital discord, needy children, aging parents, and the general business of being an adult. I placed Carter Bartosek at the center of my story. He would be a foreign correspondent stationed in Beirut, who returns to his Midwest hometown for the funeral of his best friend, a former congressman who apparently took his own life. Carter observes a rural community that, on its surface, has survived some tough financial times and, in the process, has grown, gotten bigger and gotten better. But underneath the spruced-up main street, the refurbished church, the shops, the malls and the new casino, there is a sense of corruption and rot. Carter comes to understand the truism that luxury can be more ruthless than war, but he doesn't get there easily. I was about halfway through penning this script, which I thought was pretty well mapped-out, when I realized that my main character wanted to go in a different direction than I had intended. If I followed him, I was fairly confident that the ending of my saga would make people angry, but if I tried to make my guy conform to my expectations and not his, I would simply be pushing my protagonist around. I made the decision to allow Carter to follow his own path and let the theatrical chips fall as they may. And when the play received its world premiere at Victory Gardens Theater, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the ending was the part of it people liked the best. They couldn’t see it coming because, of course, neither could I. That was a great lesson in terms of letting go of my preconceived notions regarding plot, and it is one I still carry with me.

PERSONAL EFFECTS came to me in flashes. There was a transient, a music box, strange phone calls in the middle of the night, a turning away of friends, and a cousin recently returned only to go away again. What did it all mean? I was as confused as Nicholas Barnes, the tax attorney I elected to place in the middle of my mystery. I knew that my hero, or perhaps anti-hero, would lose his assets, his condo, his career, his lover, and the life he thought he had. He would find himself out on the streets of Los Angeles, homeless and hunted by the law. And it would only be by making his way through a familial labyrinth that he would arrive at an understanding of what had happened to him and who he was. The piece was episodic and so when it was first staged at the Circle Theatre outside of Chicago, I was confident that the central playing area should be the attic of a farmhouse that would come to represent the past as well as the present. Our characters could move through this room swiftly, the way people advance and withdraw in a dream, and our scene changes would happen through light, sound and the shifting of a chair. In this manner we were able to guide our audiences with purpose and a sense of ease through this tale of retribution and grace.

I returned to a small town with SOMEBODY FOREIGN, though this one was a suburban locale where a heinous crime has been committed. A young man and his fiancée have been murdered in their home. The killer has left few clues, and the community is filled with fear. And one woman becomes the target of an investigation by the FBI, the local police, and the media. I knew that Liz Fletcher would be a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at a private college. I also knew that she would be a human rights activist. But because of her relation to the murdered man, who was her brother, and her connection to certain groups in the Gaza Strip, she would be the subject of a social inquisition and find herself standing outside the place she had always called home. Here was a thriller with a political bent that came alive at City Lit Theater Company, where it was first produced. Liz comes to know her friends, her colleagues, and the institutions they represent in a way she had never anticipated. She also comes to know a facet of her country and must finally decide what to do with the knowledge she has gained.

So there it is. There is no mystery as to why I continue to write mysteries. And it is always thrilling to embark on a new thriller. One never knows what waits behind the locked door. One never knows what strange world might be unleashed onto the stage.