The China Plays: Three Parables of Global Capital by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig: The World of Extreme Happiness; Snow in Midsummer; The King of Hell’’s Pala

＂Some playwrights have a gift to amuse; Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig has a darker gift. Anyone with romantic notions of Chinese culture will be unsettled by the jagged, unsentimental portrait of modern urban China.＂(Chicago Reader)

Poetic and devastating, sensuous and politically acute, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s China Plays explore the forces of global capital as they explode within the lives of everyday people in contemporary China.

This volume collects together the three plays in the series, including Cowhig’s exploration of the human cost of development in China’s socialist market economy (The World of Extreme Happiness), of justice and revenge amidst ecological and economic catastrophe (Snow in Midsummer), and the tale of the trade in blood that brought the AIDS crisis to rural China (The King of Hell’s Palace).

In addition to Cowhig’s plays, the volume includes a host of supplemental materials including an editorial preface and three (previously published) brief essays responding to each play by the editor, Joshua Chambers-Letson; a new introduction by theatre/performance scholar and dramaturg Christine Mok that explores the key themes in Cowhig’s body of work; a summary discussion between Cowhig, Chambers-Letson, and Mok, on Cowhig’s process and the political and aesthetic currents animating her work.

The World of Extreme Happiness: ＂Fearless, zippily-paced, and satirical . . . Cowhig forces us down the long hard look path＂ (Independent)

Snow in Midsummer: ＂Gripping and affecting... graceful and impassioned＂ (Times)

The King of Hell’s Palace: ＂A medical-scandal drama that we can’t afford to ignore＂ (Telegraph)

Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig (author)is an internationally produced playwright whose work has been staged in the United Kingdom at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, Hampstead Theatre, Trafalgar Studios 2 [West End] and the Unicorn Theatre. In the United States her work has been staged at venues that include the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Manhattan Theater Club and the Goodman Theatre. Frances’ plays have been awarded the Wasserstein Prize, the Yale Drama Series Award (selected by David Hare), an Edinburgh Fringe First Award, the David A. Callichio Award and the Keene Prize for Literature. Her plays include Lidless, The World of Extreme Happiness, Snow in Midsummer, and The King of Hell’s Palace.

Joshua Chambers-Letson (editor) is Professor of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (NYU Press, 2018) and A Race So Different: Law and Performance in Asian America (NYU Press, 2013).

Christine Mok (contributor): Christine Mok is Assistant Professor in the Deparmtent of English and the University of Rhode Island, teaching and publishing on questions of race and representation in Asian American literature, performance, and visual culture. Her work has been published in the Journal of Asian American studies, Theatre Survery, Modern Drama, and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art.