What This Place Makes Me: Contemporary Plays on Immigration

Seven award-winning plays by rising stars of contemporary theater herald a profound shift in what it means to be an American, an immigrant, and an artist on today’s stage.

Shayok Misha Chowdhury | Public Obscenities, shortlisted for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize

Hansol Jung, 2018 Whiting Award–winner | Wolf Play

Martyna Majok, 2018 Pulitzer Prize–winner | Sanctuary City

Mona Mansour, 2020 Kesselring Prize–winner | The Hour of Feeling

Charlie Oh | Coleman ’72, 2021 Paul Stephen Lim Award–winner

Mfoniso Udofia, 2021 Horton Foote Award–winner | Sojourners

Jesús I. Valles, 2023 Yale Drama Series Prize–winner | a river, its mouths

This groundbreaking collection of works by first- and second-generation immigrants unites seven exhilarating new voices of Lebanese, Nigerian, Korean, Bengali, Polish, and Mexican descent. Echoing beyond the stage, their stories draw on common experiences of displacement, alienation, and the sense of living in suspension; sometimes torn between two worlds, sometimes plummeting into the spaces between them. Amid tangled relationships, vengeful landscapes, and buried family mysteries, something universal flickers; the search for safety and the promise of home. Both haunting and galvanizing, What This Place Makes Me will be a vital touchstone for years to come.

Isaiah Stavchansky is a Mexican-American actor, writer, editor, and educator. His work has been developed and performed with The Workshop Theater, Atlantic Acting School, The Williamstown Theatre Festival, The Tank NYC, and Kenyon College. He has performed at The Williamstown Theatre Festival, Chautauqua Theater Company, and The Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater. He is a graduate of Kenyon College and Atlantic Acting School.

Shayok Misha Chowdhury is a many-tentacled writer and director based in Brooklyn. A Mark O’Donnell Prize and Princess Grace Award recipient, Misha was an inaugural Project Number One Artist at Soho Rep, where he directed the world premiere of his play Public Obscenities (one of three finalists for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize and a New York Times Critic’s Pick). Misha was also awarded a Jonathan Larson Grant for his body of work writing musicals with composer Laura Grill Jaye; their most recent collaboration, How the White Girl Got Her Spots and Other 90s Trivia, was awarded the 2022 Relentless Award. Other collaborations: Brother, Brother (New York Theatre Workshop) with Aleshea Harris; SPEECH (Philly Fringe) with Lightning Rod Special; MukhAgni (Under the Radar @ The Public Theater) with Kameron Neal; Your Healing Is Killing Me (PlayMakers Rep) with Virginia Grise. Misha is also an alumnus of New York Theatre Workshop’s 2050 Fellowship, The Public Theater’s Devised Theater Working Group, Ars Nova’s Makers Lab, New York Stage and Film Nexus, the Sundance Art of Practice Fellowship, The Drama League’s Next Stage Residency, and Soho Rep’s Writer Director Lab.

Hansol Jung is a playwright from South Korea. Productions include Wild Goose Dreams (The Public Theater, La Jolla Playhouse), Wolf Play (NNPN Rolling Premiere: Artists Rep, Mixed Blood, Company One), Cardboard Piano (Humana Festival at ATL), Among the Dead (Ma-Yi Theatre), and No More Sad Things (Sideshow, Boise Contemporary). Commissions from The Public Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, Seattle Repertory Theatre, National Theatre in UK, Playwrights Horizons, Artists Repertory Theater, Ma-Yi Theatre and Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Her work has been developed at Royal Court, New York Theatre Workshop, Hedgebrook, Berkeley Repertory, Sundance Theatre Lab, O’Neill Theater Center, and the Lark. Hansol is the recipient of the Hodder Fellowship, Whiting Award, Helen Merrill Award, Page 73 Fellowship, Lark’s Rita Goldberg Fellowship, NYTW’s 2050 Fellowship, MacDowell Artist Residency, and International Playwrights Residency at Royal Court. She is a proud member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, NYTW’s Usual Suspects, and The New Class of Kilroys.

Martyna Majok was born in Bytom, Poland, and raised in New Jersey and Chicago. She was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Cost of Living, which was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Play in 2023. Other plays include Sanctuary City, Queens, and Ironbound, which have been produced across American and international stages. Martyna studied at Yale School of Drama, Juilliard, University of Chicago, and New Jersey public schools.

Mona Mansour is a Lebanese-American playwright and television writer based in Brooklyn. Her plays include Unseen (Oregon Shakespeare Festival, The Gift Theater); We Swim We Talk We Go to War (Golden Thread); The Way West (Labyrinth Theater, Steppenwolf). The full-length version of The Hour of Feeling was at Actors Theater of Louisville’s Humana Fest; an Arabic Translation was presented at NYU Abu Dhabi in 2016. Urge for Going was presented at The Public Theater and Golden Thread. Mona Mansour was a member of The Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group. With Tala Manassah she wrote Falling Down the Stairs, an EST/Sloan commission. Their play Dressing is part of Facing Our Truths, commissioned by the New Black Festival. Awards include: 2020 Kesselring, 2020 Helen Merrill Award, 2014 Middle East America Playwright Award. Residencies: MacDowell Colony, Space on Ryder Farm, Sundance Theater Institute, New Dramatists Class of 2020. Mona writes for NBC’s New Amsterdam, and is working on a script for AMC International. In 2019, she formed the theater company Society with Scott Illingworth and Tim Nicolai.