Yide Cai: Steeped(品)

Steeped(品) is a metatheatrical play that reimagines the Boston Tea Party from the perspective of the tea itself — a leaf that refuses to be a lifeless symbol but rather faces its death. It is set on the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, where two actors are rehearsing a new Boston production about the Tea Party written by a playwright based in New York. One night, the tea puppet they are playing as a prop speaks to them, and tells them that it is the tea lying at the bottom of Boston Harbor for the past 250 years, plucked from a tree in China, processed, shipped, commodified, and ultimately dumped into the sea.

Encouraged by the tea, the actors begin staging a revolution of their own—questioning their playwright, resisting the regional-to-Broadway development pipeline, and demanding independence from the theater industry apparatus that profits from their labor. Yet their ambition for recognition threatens to sabotage the very freedom they seek. Amid this unraveling, Tea pushes for the control of its own fate, not to win an ideological battle, but to escape eternal symbolism and finally live, and die, as something human rather than a prop in someone else’s myth.

This workshop production of Steeped(品) will take place in Boston during the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, a city still harbors the myth the play  interrogates. Presented as an in-progress, site-responsive staging, and designed for flexible, nontraditional spaces, the performance will unfold among the audience, collapsing rehearsal and performance. Two actors as ensemble will play multiple roles while jointly voicing and manipulating a single tea puppet that exists between them, so that movement and choreography will propel the storytelling. In the city where revolution is continually reenacted and commemorated, the production asks what it means to restage that history now, and who gets to speak when the symbol speaks back.

ARTISTS

From Shenzhen, China, Yide Cai (蔡逸得) is a playwright, poet, and translator, now an MFA Playwriting candidate at Boston University. His play The Rice Eaters debuted Off-Broadway at the 2025 Broadway Bound Theatre Festival, while his short play A Middle Passage won the 50th Annual Off-Off-Broadway Festival and is set to be published by Concord Theatricals. He is developing his new play Steeped with Pipeline Theater’s Playlab in 2026, and is also one of the playwrights for The Episodic Theatre Project Season 3. As a fellow of the Laboratory for Global Performance & Politics and a resident artist at Goethe-Institut Boston, he is always chasing connections across distance.

Skye Xiaotian Lu is a theatre director and multidisciplinary performance artist working across directing, dramaturgy, choreography, and documentary film. Her practice moves between international theatrical traditions and cultural contexts, exploring questions of identity, memory, and borders while pushing the boundaries between different art forms. Often through conceptual processes, she creates physically driven and organic works where meanings can be created for the people.
Her directing projects include Die Kantine (Berlin), The Delayed Trial (In-N-Out Theatre, Beijing), and Three Sisters · Waiting for Godot, as well as new works at Eugene O’Neil Theater Center and experimental workshops such as Godot Complex and I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow. She has collaborated as dramaturg, choreographer, and assisted on productions including Intractable Woman, Our Class (4 Lucille Lortel Awards), and The Dybbuk (Elliot Norton Awards), and has studied directing with director Yury Butusov. Her artistic practice is informed by philosophy, literature, or the world, her ongoing journey across lands and cultures.

Qingan Zhang is a multidisciplinary scenographer, producer, and devising artist mainly based in New York and Boston. Her works explore narratives embedded in her designs beyond forms or performance methods. She seeks to empower physicality within the storytelling of the integrated spatial experience. Through layers of materials, objects, multimedia and objective metaphors, she juxtaposes materiality of the built environment and externalization of the intangible mental fantasy rooted in the narratives.

This artist residency is generously supported by the 501(c)(3) organization Studio 170 at Goethe-Institut Boston.