Geography: Americas > Northern America > United States of America
Year: 2017
Produced by: Urban Stages（Off-Broadway, New York）
Creative Team: A play by Zhu Yi | Director: John Giampietro
Synopsis: A Deal is a dark comedy that follows Li Su, a privileged Chinese student-turned-aspiring actress in New York, whose attempt to secure success and belonging leads her to fabricate a traumatic identity as a human rights victim, while her parents arrive from China carrying illicit wealth to buy her an apartment, revealing deep fractures within the family and escalating ideological conflict. Structured as a fast-paced, multi-layered satire that blends realism with theatrical self-reflexivity (including audition scenes and meta-theatrical encounters), the play situates migration within the circuits of global capital, elite education, and cultural performance rather than forced displacement. It interrogates diasporic assimilation, self-exoticization, and the commodification of suffering, exposing how immigration status, identity, and even trauma can become negotiable “deals,” thereby raising ethical questions about authenticity, representation, and the entanglement of personal ambition with geopolitical and economic power.
Source: https://www.zhuyizhuyi.com/single-post/2017/10/08/adeal