Three local theatre companies are starting 2026 off with a high-powered, multi-pronged partnership, presenting a World Premiere play that also includes original music. SIS Productions, Yun Theatre, and Seattle Public Theater present Li, by creative writer Wei He, accompanied by music written by Seattle-based musical artist YUELAN.
Li is set in Inner Mongolia and focuses on the title character, a woman named Li whose career choice of thievery sets the comedy in motion. Together with her twin brother, her mother, her friend, and his pet chicken, Li traverses the realms of loneliness and generosity, with melody along the way.
Wei He drew her inspiration for Li’s story from two other tales, Jia Zhangke’s movie, Xiao Wu, also known as Pickpocket, and a short story that He read as a child. “The protagonists of both stories are thieves,” playwright He said. “I’ve always been intrigued by this marginalized group of people and learned that in prison, a thief wouldn’t land on the bottom rung of the hierarchy behind bars because he is seen as a craftsman.” Over seven years, He wrote multiple drafts of the play, initially writing her protagonist as a young man, but ultimately realizing that the story needed Li to be a young woman.
On her travels, young Li’s heart is usually in the right place. “I think my favorite aspect of Li as a character is that she always tries to help, even when it doesn’t always pan out,” He shared, “as well as how she uses humor as a front to hide her vulnerability and loneliness.”
Along with humor, music, and Li’s journey, He wanted to explore the dynamics of parent-child relationships in an East Asian family, especially when parents focus more on their boys than on their girls. Since childhood, she had also dreamed of including a pet chicken in one of her stories. “In the street, I once saw a lady walking her pet hen,” He recalled of her early years. “She kept calling it in Cantonese, 肥婆, which means fat lady.”
But this woman in He’s memory didn’t just walk with the chicken. “She was carrying a basket so when they needed to cross the street, she would put the basket on the ground,” He recounted. “The hen would jump into the basket, and then she would carry it across the street and let it out again. It was the cutest thing ever.” Wei He wanted to foreground this sensibility in her play, so yes, there will be a live chicken on stage during each performance, and reportedly, this particular chicken (a family member of actor Owen Yen, who plays the role of Li’s friend Yu) is the sweetest and cleanest chicken known to the entire production team.
After seven years of writing, Wei He thought she might have to wait another seven years until Li was produced, but in 2024, her play was chosen for Seattle Public Theater’s Distillery New Works Festival. “This is how I made connections with the wonderful people at Seattle Public Theater,” He said. During the festival, she also met director Christie Zhao via actor Adele Lim, both of whom are now involved in the current Seattle production.
Seattle Public Theater has collaborated with SIS Productions several times in the past, and Li seemed a natural fit for another co-production. SIS Productions chose Li over a stack of other scripts that didn’t share the same positive outlook. “The scripts focused on an us-versus-them mentality, or the characters survived by being mean or putting down others in order to stand up for themselves,” explained Kathy Hsieh, Co-Executive Producer for SIS Productions. “And, to be honest, we see that in the news every day, a focus on capitalism and personal interests over collaboration and collective benefit, or how people are pushing other people away in order to protect themselves, making the divide even greater.”
SIS Productions appreciated Li for its heart-warming energy, which Hsieh said leans “into compassion rather than division,” and the company then hired Zhao to direct Li. “The more specific your production choices are, the more universal the play becomes for all audiences,” Hsieh said. “Inner Mongolia is an autonomous region of China and we felt it was really important to have someone who understands Chinese culture and its distinctive aesthetic direct the show.”
From the beginning, Zhao found the play very poetic. “The play felt like a series of slices of life rather than a traditional narrative,” she said. “There were multiple threads happening at once, and reading it felt closer to drifting through someone’s inner world than following a straight plot.” For Zhao, the play feels lived-in rather than explained, and it offers questions that feel like invitations.
As the Artistic Director for Yun Theatre, Zhao also brought connections of her own. “Yun Theatre has contributed deeply on the artistic side, particularly in assembling a strong design team and helping articulate the cultural textures of the piece,” Zhao said. Together with SPT, which offered the theatre space and administrative support, and SIS Productions, which led the producing tasks, Zhao believes the triple co-production has made the production both structurally sound and artistically specific.
For Zhao, one of the biggest challenges in directing Li has been navigating the many different facades of Li’s life. “She has individual scenes with several different people, and each encounter feels like a digression, another way she explains or reframes her life for the audience,” Zhao described. “These digressions take very different forms, as some live in Mongolian rock music, some in memory, and others in a grounded, present-day reality.”
To aid in presenting Li in such wide variety, Zhao cast Adele Lim in the lead role. “She brought a sense of joy and playfulness that immediately aligned with how I was imagining Li,” Zhao said of Lim. “She spends a great deal of time on text analysis, paying close attention to every word, punctuation mark, and line break. That level of precision has been especially valuable for a script like Li, where meaning often lives in small shifts rather than big statements.”
Likewise, Lim is thrilled to collaborate on this new production of Li with a director and producers whom she knows from other meaningful shows, including Unrivaled, also co-produced by SIS and SPT. “Li has the most monologues of a character I’ve ever had to play,” Lim observed. “And yet, Li is not a character who, in her real life, takes up a lot of space. Talk about paradoxes! The logic of these direct addresses and why they happen leaves a lot to the imagination. Very cool, very hard.”
Lim calls Li’s story a pseudo-coming-of-age journey in her 30s against all cultural odds. “On a day-to-day basis, this looks like Li using her sharp wit for justifying and climbing the ladder in her career in altruistic thievery,” Lim said, “which she calls ‘moving things around.’”
Zhao appreciates how Lim brings her observations to the artistic team. “In rehearsal, she consistently arrives with questions that grow out of work she’s already done on her own,” Zhao said. “We often use rehearsal time to investigate those questions together rather than starting from scratch.” And Zhao uses WeChat to loop Wei He into these conversations live during rehearsal.
After collaborating with Zhao remotely throughout the rehearsal process, Wei He will be in Seattle on February 6 for a post-show talkback with the audience. Above all, He is thrilled to see a play about Hohhot, capital city of Inner Mongolia, on stage for American audiences. “It has been an interesting and bizarre experience to write about something I am so close to in my second language,” He said. “This process of defamiliarization enables me to see that world through a new lens.”
Li runs from January 16 to February 8 at Seattle Public Theater, 7312 West Green Lake Drive North, Seattle.
