Taiwan / New York / currently elsewhere

Melvin
Ningyao Yen

playwright · cultural critic · theatre maker · access advocate

I write plays and essays about migration, intimacy, ritual, and the slightly ridiculous ways people try to hold on to one another. I also make theatre, think about access, and take too many notes.

enter the theatre read the notes

p.s. just a human.

Melvin seated on a red open-top bus in New York City, looking off to the side. — somewhere between a rehearsal and lunch

often thinking about: waiting / impermanence / Buddhism / animals / philosophy / semiotics / existentialism / absurdism / the ethical power of slowness / what a body knows before language

01 / theatre

theatre, in several forms

I usually enter through the writing. Sometimes I direct. Often I am also the person with the spreadsheet, the tape, or the question nobody remembered to ask.

play · 2026

Bodega Cat

A 24-hour Brooklyn bodega. A missing cat. Two people who do not want to go home.

Chain Theatre Summer One-Act Festival · PlayGround-NY Best of 2026 Honorable Mention Finalist

see the festival page [the cat is an it.]

play · 2026

Something Blue

On a wedding day, an old note turns up inside the bride’s dress.

Sapphest Festival V · Brooklyn Art Haus

solo play · 2026

Present

San Francisco, 1885. Mary Tape brings her children to the first day of the segregated Chinese Primary School, five days after writing that they would never attend it.

PlayGround-NY · Playwrights Horizons

see the playbill

Mandarin-English play · 2026

Juliet & Jul-Yingtai

Verona, Hangzhou, a prison, and the afterlife begin leaking into the same lifetime.

co-written with Wisteria Deng · Vermilion Artist Collective / Jersey City Theater Center

see the production

monologue · 2026

Please Don’t Bless Me

A woman returns to a temple in Taiwan to ask a god to stop helping with a wish that has already begun to come true.

Taipei Shorts · Taipei · one performer / a phone / divination blocks

solo play · physical theatre

Waning Moon

A solo play about a dancer, a photographer, and the long memory of the body.

one actor / a pole / photographs / red thread / Baoding balls

play

No-Show

An immigrant, a blind woman, and an audio-description voice wait at a curb. The ride does not come.

play with music · 2023

AWAKE

Two people wake inside a world that may have been built for them. A Mandarin play with music and English captions.

book & lyrics / director · Walkerspace, New York

see the production

ten-minute play · 2026

Ghost Light

One child, one ghost light, and an empty theatre that refuses to sleep.

PlayGround-NY · Monday Night PlayGround: “Bedtime Stories”

see the playbill

play

The Flight of Impermanence

A Taiwanese American family, Buddhist inheritance, migration, and the things a mother leaves unsaid.

stage / screen

Breakfast

Two people eat breakfast. The ordinary becomes evidence.

adapted as a short film, directed by Luise von Finckh

02 / writing

notes from looking

Criticism, essays, fragments, and the occasional attempt to understand what I just saw.

The Public Theater

We Can Still Hear You, Antigone: A Reflection

A commissioned reflection on Antigone, abortion, surveillance, and who gets to make decisions about a body.

The Amp / Asian American Arts Alliance

Not All Representation Feels Like Home

On watching Asian representation onstage and still feeling strangely outside the room.

HowlRound Theatre Commons

Presence Before Performance at ODIN HOME

Notes from ten days of training, watching, eating, moving, and trying to understand presence before performance.

ongoing notebook

The Ritual of Seeing

The less official home for essays, criticism, poems, fragments, and unfinished thinking.

peer-reviewed article · 2023

Social Circles on Individual Theatre Attendance

Published in the Journal of Arts Management. An empirical study of how social relationships shape the decision to attend theatre.

ongoing research

Making Time Legible

Research on slowness as a perceptual technique—and as an ethical force—in live performance, embodied attention, and audience experience.

03 / access

access is part of the form

Access shapes my art. It affects what I write, how I pace a scene, how I describe an image, how I build a room, and who I imagine is already there.

practice

From the beginning

My practice includes Relaxed Performance, sensory access, audience evaluation, visual and sensory guides, captioning, audio description, and access-informed dramaturgy.

Lincoln Center · 2025–26

Accessibility Programs Fellow

I worked across Relaxed Performances, Lincoln Center Moments, Big Umbrella Festival, sensory tools, guides, staff practice, and audience evaluation.

still learning

More than one way to sense a room

I work with audio description and captioning, and I am learning ASL. These languages keep changing how I understand writing, editing, timing, and attention.

relaxed performancesensory accessaudio descriptioncaptioningASL learneraudience evaluationvisual & sensory guidesaccess as dramaturgy

Melvin sitting outside a workshop in New York, holding an iced coffee. — the person, allegedly

04 / about

a nerdy writer with too many tabs open

Born in Taiwan, made in part by New York. I write plays and criticism, make theatre, and work on access.

I read too much theory, take too many notes, walk my dog, study divination systems, and keep learning languages badly enough to notice how differently they arrange the world. Buddhism matters to me. So do semiotics, existentialism, absurdism, and the question of what changes when we slow down.

I am a third-rate poet, usually hiding behind a camera. I also teach writing and performance, which is somehow easier than introducing myself at a party.

I have been part of The Public Theater’s BIPOC Critics Lab and PlayGround-NY Writers Pool, and held fellowships at Lincoln Center, Manhattan Theatre Club, and Playwrights Horizons. My plays have been presented in New York, Jersey City, and Taipei; my criticism appears in The Public Theater, The Amp, HowlRound, and The Ritual of Seeing.

some rooms I’ve been in

The Public TheaterBIPOC Critics Lab · 2025–26
PlayGround-NYWriters Pool · 2025–27
Lincoln Center for the Performing ArtsAccessibility Programs Fellow · 2025–26
Manhattan Theatre ClubProducing Fellow · 2024
Playwrights HorizonsGeneral Management Fellow · 2023

05 / elsewhere

side quests & other evidence of life

When I am not writing or making theatre, I am usually walking Didi, taking photographs, watching another film, or learning something with no immediate practical use.

metaphysics, apparently

BaZi / Zi Wei / astrology / tarot / magic · mostly studying, always overthinking the symbols

the charts have opinions.

offline, supposedly

walking Didi twice a day · an extremely introverted life · Buddhism · films · music · French / Spanish / Japanese, unevenly · chess badly · third-rate poetry

no link. a small mercy.

06 / contact

say hello

For plays, readings, commissions, access work, collaborations, or just a thoughtful hello.

No public email address here. The robots have enough.

Melvin
Ningyao Yen