Our Mission
CHUANG Stage creates joyful and radical Asian American theatre in the languages our communities live in, and opens new doors to the arts for those long excluded from them.
Our Vision
A future in the American theatre shaped by artists and audiences of Asian descent.
Our Values
Ensuring inclusive and accessible theater experiences for pan-Asian language communities in Boston.
Harnessing the power of arts in nurturing the cultural well-being of the Asian American community.
Celebrating the contributions of immigrants in shaping the diversity of America.
Cultivating a progressive and disruptive work environment in the theater industry.
Fostering inter-racial solidarity and unity among Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.
chuàng 创 — to begin; to initiate; to create.
CHUANG Stage cultivates joyful and radical Asian American stories that pioneer a translingual activism in the arts.
Founded in 2018, CHUANG Stage is Boston's first Asian American theatre company and the first in New England's history. As a resident company of the Boston Center for the Arts in the South End, we produce a year-round season of new and reimagined work by pan-Asian artists, told in the many languages our communities live in.
Every CHUANG performance is Pay-As-You-Are, with tickets starting at $0, and nearly every performance is paired with a community event: food from a neighborhood restaurant, a craft workshop, live music and dance, a table for a local organization. We treat the theatre as a civic gathering space, and we carry that work outward to Boston Chinatown and the region's Asian immigrant neighborhoods.
Our work includes:
Mainstage Season: world premieres, new adaptations, and co-productions with Boston's leading theatres.
Boston Chinatown Song Cycle: original music rooted in the neighborhood's stories.
Asian Joy Night: when a partner theatre programs Asian American work, CHUANG hosts one night within the run, bringing $0-floor pricing, language access, and curated community dialogue.
Found in Translation: a multilingual reading series developing new plays by Asian American playwrights for Boston Chinatown.
CHUANG Lab@Emerson: our artist development pipeline for emerging theatre makers from China and the Mandarin-speaking world.
New work is at the heart of CHUANG Stage. We develop and premiere plays by Asian American writers, often focusing on the languages their characters live in, and we stay with these plays across years through readings, workshops, and full productions. Many begin in our Found in Translation series in Boston Chinatown, where community audiences help shape them from their earliest drafts. Christina R. Chan's The Fortune Teller, inspired by the early Chinese immigrants buried at Mount Hope Cemetery in Mattapan, grew from years of development into a workshop production co-produced with TC2 Theatre Company, and her Busing the Buffer Zone brought the forgotten story of Chinatown mothers organizing during Boston's 1970s busing crisis to the stage alongside an exhibition at Pao Arts Center. Brandon Zang's Nüwa in Fairyland premiered at the Boston Center for the Arts, weaving Shakespeare together with Chinese folklore. Zoë Kim's Did You Eat? (밥 먹었니?) was named to the Boston Globe's top ten, earned three Elliot Norton Award nominations, and went on to a sold-out run at the Public Theater. With the Huntington, CHUANG co-produced The Ceremony, the first world premiere in Mfoniso Udofia's Ufot Cycle. This season, Laowang: A Chinatown King Lear by Alex Lin continues that work, reimagining Shakespeare for Chinatown.
Today CHUANG Stage is a year-round producing company with the support of leading national and regional funders, including the Shubert Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Barr Foundation, the New England Foundation for the Arts, The Boston Foundation, Mass Humanities, the Asian American Arts Alliance, and Bank of America. In 2025, the City of Boston's Boston Cultural Council named CHUANG a Model Equity Organizations, recognizing its sustained commitment to advancing equity in the city's arts and culture. The company welcomes more than 5,000 people each year, performs at 98% capacity, and has paid more than $850,000 directly to artists and arts workers since its founding.
