playwright christopher chen
on THE MOTION
It starts out as this relatively low-stakes debate on animal rights. I’m not sure if you know the podcast “Intelligence Squared Debates,” but there’s a moderator and then two sets of experts on two sides of an issue, and they go through this debate where each person in turn does a little monolog, an opening statement, very polite and formal, and then they take questions from the audience and pose questions to each other and give wrap-up arguments.
So about half of the play consists of a debate along those lines on animal rights, and hopefully just the debate itself will be very compelling and draw the audience into subject matter maybe they haven’t thought much about. And then the play starts to kind of magically, structurally change, and some of the philosophical questions at the core of this argument start to be expressed in much more personal and theatrical ways.
director PATRICK DOOLEY
on THE MOTION
Morals are slippery. How many public figures make bold declarations they will soon compromise with their own actions? How many impassioned ‘til-death-dous-parts melt away over time? How many laws do we applaud until someone we love is subject to them? We crave the comfort of moral absolutism and the sense of safety and structure it promises.
But humans are messy. We are all messy. Christopher Chen’s plays are fascinated by our stumbling and earnest attempts to grasp a sense of self and “the right way of being,” even as our own perspectives and the world around us continue to shift and evolve. In a way, we are like the heroes of this play: a group of scientists, “searchers,” testing and exploring our ways through life. The twists and turns of Chen’s narratives thrill not because they are so farfetched, but because they are as fantastical as our own.
We welcome you to engage with this performance just as you do your own lives: with a spirit of thoughtfulness and wonder. Stay open. Stay curious. Things turn so quickly.
Playwright CHRISTOPHER CHEN
Christopher Chen is an Obie award-winning playwright whose full-length works have been produced and developed across the United States and abroad, at companies such as the American Conservatory Theater, Artists Repertory, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Crowded Fire, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Finborough Impact Theatre, InterAct Theatre, Lincoln Center Theatre (LCT3), Long Wharf Theatre, Magic Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, Playwrights Foundation, Playwrights Horizons, Rep at St. Louis, San Francisco Playhouse, Seattle Rep, Shotgun Players, Silk Road Rising, Singapore Repertory Theatre, Soho Rep, Sundance Theatre Lab, Theatre Mu, The Vineyard, The Wilma and Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company among others.
Honors include: 2024 Windham Campbell Prize for Playwriting; 2021 USA Fellow; 2020 Steinberg Playwright Award; 2017 Obie Award for Playwriting (for Caught); 2017 Lanford Wilson Award; the 2015-2016 Sundance Institute/Time Warner Foundation Fellowship for theater; Paula Vogel Playwriting Award, through which he was the 2013-2014 playwright-in-residence at The Vineyard Theatre; Barrymore Award (for Caught); PHINDIE Critics Award (for Caught); Drama League Nomination (for Caught); Glickman Award (for The Hundred Flowers Project); Rella Lossy Playwriting Award (for The Hundred Flowers Project); shortlist for the James Tait Black Award (for The Hundred Flowers Project); nomination for the Steinberg Award (for The Hundred Flowers Project); 2nd Place in the Belarus Free Theater International Competition of Modern Dramaturgy (for Into the Numbers).