peerless

2018
Director

Written by Jiehae Park, produced by the Stanford Asian American Theater Project

peerless undoubtedly immediately evokes iconic high school stories like Heathers and Mean Girls and darkly romanticized visions of 80s and 90s teens and America like Freaks and Geeks, Twin Peaks, The Breakfast Club, and Stranger Things. Yet while our production pays stylistic homage to such works, there’s obviously something so visceral, so gripping, so devastatingly real about the content.

Even though peerless paints a portrait of pan-East Asian twins in a generalized Midwestern town, Jiehae Park still speaks volumes to specificity when she smartly notes that M and L are, at least, “not Chinese.” peerless straddles the difficult boundary between culpability and complicity but never provides us with a firm answer. Do we entirely blame M and L, or are they products of their society and community, or both? Where is the community that should not be a bystander to the injustices committed by the twins, and by proxy, this very Asian American community?

— Excerpt from the peerless Director’s Note

Images courtesy of Starr Jiang