Atlanta, 13 March 2022 – Playwright Lloyd Suh and stage director Eric Ting held a talk and Q&A session about their collaboration for Ting’s upcoming production of Suh’s play, Bina’s Six Apples, at the Alliance Theatre organized by the Alliance’s Rita Kompelmakher and Rahul Bali of the Asian American Journalists Association. The play is scheduled to run until 27 March.
The play centers on the young girl Bina whose family grows the best apples in Korea. The Korean War breaks out, however, and Bina’s family must unfortunately flee their longtime home and orchard. Bina is separated from her family in the chaos and her only link to find them are the six apples she carries. She soon discovers that memories, stories, and her own growth play a part in reconnecting with her family and finding a new home.
Lloyd Suh provided several insights into the background of his play, including that it was inspired by a story about his father. Suh maintained that the play is almost entirely fiction, however, and not semi-autobiographical in its depiction of events. Janice Yu, of Fox 5 Atlanta and also the Asian American Journalists Association, led the latter half of the talk. Suh, a 2nd generation Korean-American, stressed the importance of resilience and optimism in Bina’s Six Apples and the immigrant experience in general. Both Suh and Ting detailed their backgrounds, providing anecdotes of their forays into the world of theatre. Ting noted that the play is the most produced Off-Broadway play so far in 2022, and humorously revealed he had been a biochemistry major when he took a puppetry class which altered his life plans.
Suh is known for winning the 2019 Herb Alpert Award for Theatre and writing the plays The Chinese Lady, Charles Francis Chan Jr.'s Exotic Oriental Murder Mystery, American Hwangap, The Wong Kids in the Secret of the Space Chupacabra Go!, and others. He was born in Detroit, Michigan and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Eric Ting is a longtime stage director who has won an Off-Broadway Theatre Award and directed several theater works. His credits include To Kill a Mockingbird, The World of Extreme Happiness, Brownsville Song, and Lewiston. Ting was born in Grand Forks, North Dakota and was grew up in Morgantown, West Virginia. He currently serves as the artistic director of the California Shakespeare Theatre and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
