By Amelia Faircloth

The sounds of jam-packed restaurants, blaring car radios, and chattering locals set the scene for playwright Stephanie Kyung-Sun Walter's virtual play reading, Acetown Wishes and Plexiglass Dreams. The ambient noise transported audience members from all across the country to the setting of her story—Philadelphia’s bustling Koreatown.

Walters’s piece was one of four plays that were workshopped and presented as a part of UCSB Theater and Dance’s second BIPOC Reading Series Festival, a yearly event that invites a diverse group of emerging and veteran playwrights to collaborate with UCSB students and staff on their newest work.

Risa Brainin, UCSB Theater professor and LAUNCH PAD artistic director, created the BIPOC Reading Series Festival in 2021.

The festival—which uses the acronym for Black, Indigenous, People of Color— took place over a week, allowing a 20-hour workshopping period for each play, in which playwrights, directors, and staff bounce ideas off each other in a dynamic celebration of creativity and diversity.

Hosted by three UCSB Theater and Dance initiatives—LAUNCH PAD, Amplify, and New and Reimagined Work—the BIPOC Reading Series Festival mirrors the collaborative structure that UCSB Theater professor Risa Brainin has been experimenting with over her 17 years serving as LAUNCH PAD’s creative director.

“The core of LAUNCH PAD is this preview production idea, where a play is fully produced, but stays in previews so the writer can keep working all through the performances,” Brainin said.

Born in April of 2021 as a response to the murder of George Floyd and the nationwide outcry for social justice reform, The BIPOC Reading Series Festival extends this collaborative model by creating a space specifically for productions written, performed, and directed by people of color.

“In LAUNCH PAD we’ve always had diversity of voices, but it’s different when you say ‘you know what, this Festival is going to be ALL diverse voices,’” Brainin said.

This year’s festival presented four new plays, all by BIPOC writers—an interactive piece about the lives of stuntmen, a documentary-style film about living through dictatorships, a queer romantic comedy, and an emotional narrative about returning home to Koreatown.

Award-winning playwright Stephanie Kyung-Sun Walters presented a reading of her newest play Acetone Wishes and Plexiglass Dreams as a part of the 2022 BIPOC Reading Series Festival.

Walters’s play Acetone Wishes and Plexiglass Dreams kicked off the series of performances that began on Friday, exploring themes of human connection.

The play’s main character Celina returns to Koreatown in Philadelphia after the death of her older sister Mihee. Upon her arrival, she’s faced with gossiping aunties, secrets, guilt, and the ever-present memory of her sister.

“It’s a play about coming back home,” Walters said in a Zoom interview. “It’s about why we return home, what happens when you come home as an adult, and what the expectations of that are.”

Walters's piece experienced the benefits of the festival’s workshopping method, as the process prompted her to change her original vision for the play.

In the original draft of the play, the ghost of the sister, Mihee, was not supposed to make a physical appearance. But in the workshopping process, Walters's changed her mind and began rewriting so that now a ghost appears in all three of the dramas that form the playwright’s Koreatown trilogy.

“As I was working with these students and everyone was bringing in such amazing energy and feeling the energy of the room, I thought ‘the sister has to be real, we have to make her a ghost, we have to put her in the space and do it,’” Walters said.

Walters began writing plays after working as a professional actor in Philadelphia for 10 years and noticing few roles for Asians.

“I started playwriting, really, because I was seeing a lack of opportunity for Asian American actors in town,” she said. “I thought ‘You know what? I’m just going to start writing them for my friends,’ because I want to see their talented spirits doing work,” she said.

She is also a founding member of the grassroots collective, Philadelphia Asian Performing Artists, or PAPAS, which addresses the lack of artistic and economic opportunities for people of Pan-Asian descent. Walters currently serves as the lead artist of PAPA’s Playwright Project, working with other playwrights to hone their craft through workshops and readings.

(Clockwise from top left) Ahlora Smith as Celina, Lucas Cheng as Inky, and Ruffy Landayan as Celina’s absent father, in Acetone Wishes and Plexiglass Dreams.

“I want to foster a space for emerging artists that want to write,” Walters said, “It’s hard sometimes when you are in predominantly white spaces as an Asian American or BIPOC person trying to create something. There’s not this unspoken understanding of the culture, the history, or just why these characters are doing the things that they are doing,” she said.

Fostering a space that is not white-centric for BIPOC stories to be told is exactly what Risa Brainin set out to do with the BIPOC Reading Series Festival.

“The theater profession is often centered in whiteness and it shouldn't be,” Brainin said. “We are trying to center, equity, diversity, inclusion and access in our work and everything we are doing in the department. “

For playwrights like Walters, opportunities such as UCSB’s BIPOC Reading Series Festival are essential for creative artists of color.

“It’s bringing our stories to the forefront, and saying to audiences that may not have seen themselves represented on the stage, that theater is for you too, and your stories are valid and important and need to be shared, and cherished, and told till the end of time,” she said.

Amelia Faircloth is a fourth-year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in English. She is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.