Melvin Yen
Taiwan / New York / currently elsewhere
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.
Buddhist. Extremely introverted. Usually hiding behind a camera.
p.s. just a human.
often thinking about: waiting / impermanence / Buddhism / animals / philosophy / semiotics / existentialism / absurdism / the ethical power of slowness / what a body knows before language
01 / theatre
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.
After a bodega cat disappears, two people stay. They argue about what happened, who saw it, and whether the cat was ever theirs to name.
Chain Theatre Summer One-Act Festival · PlayGround-NY Best of 2026 Honorable Mention Finalist
see the festival page [the cat is an it.]
On the day of a wedding, a bride and the woman who arrived too late stand in a room full of borrowed blue things.
Sapphest Festival V · Brooklyn Art Haus
A solo play about a dancer, a photographer, and the long memory of the body.
one actor / a pole / photographs / red thread / Baoding balls
An immigrant, a blind woman, and an audio-description voice wait at a curb. The ride does not come.
waiting / access / departure / the voice that describes what is missing
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 productionOne child, one ghost light, and an empty theatre that refuses to sleep.
PlayGround-NY · Monday Night PlayGround: “Bedtime Stories”
see the playbillA Taiwanese American family, Buddhist inheritance, migration, and the things a mother leaves unsaid.
in development
Two people eat breakfast. The ordinary becomes evidence.
adapted as a short film, directed by Luise von Finckh
directing
2023 · Walkerspace
I wrote and directed it, and spent a lot of time thinking about dreams, truth, projection, and how to make Mandarin theatre legible without flattening it.
Mandarin performance · English captions · original music · projection
see the production pageI am interested in rhythm, attention, multilingual performance, and what the body understands before the explanation arrives.
building / producing / access
Relaxed Performance, sensory access, visual and sensory guides, audio description, captioning, audience evaluation, and ASL in progress. More on access ↓
production / stage management
02 / writing
Criticism, essays, fragments, and the occasional attempt to understand what I just saw.
A commissioned reflection on law, care, custody, and a voice that keeps returning.
The Amp / Asian American Arts AllianceWhat happens when representation sees your face but misses your life.
HowlRound Theatre CommonsTen days at Odin Home, and what the body remembered before I could explain it.
ongoing notebookThe less official home for essays, criticism, poems, fragments, and unfinished thinking.
research / questions with citations
Published in the Journal of Arts Management. An empirical study of how social relationships shape the decision to attend theatre.
Research on slowness as a perceptual technique—and as an ethical force—in live performance, embodied attention, and audience experience.
03 / access
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
My practice includes Relaxed Performance, sensory access, audience evaluation, visual and sensory guides, captioning, audio description, and access-informed dramaturgy.
Lincoln Center · 2025–26
I worked across Relaxed Performances, Lincoln Center Moments, Big Umbrella Festival, sensory tools, guides, staff practice, and audience evaluation.
still learning
I work with audio description and captioning, and I am learning ASL. These languages keep changing how I understand writing, editing, timing, and attention.
04 / about
Born in Taiwan, made in part by New York. I write plays and criticism, make theatre, and work on access.
My work keeps circling Buddhist thought, diaspora, queer intimacy, embodied performance, semiotics, existentialism, absurdism, and attention—especially what happens before we manage to explain ourselves. I am also interested in the ethical power of slowness.
I like theories, rehearsal rooms, long walks with my dog, divination systems, and sentences that almost know what they mean. I am a third-rate poet and, whenever possible, the person hiding behind the 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; my criticism appears in The Public Theater, The Amp, HowlRound, and The Ritual of Seeing.
selected rooms / recognition
05 / elsewhere
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.
essays / criticism / poems / unfinished thinking
02photography / cities / bodies / whatever the light was doing
03podcast + video / aesthetics / philosophy / bilingual thoughts
BaZi / Zi Wei / astrology / tarot / magic · mostly studying, always overthinking the symbols
the charts have opinions.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
For plays, readings, commissions, access work, collaborations, or just a thoughtful hello.
No public email address here. The robots have enough.