Discipline: Theatre – playwriting

Catherine Yu

Discipline: Theatre – playwriting
Region: New York, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 2017
More: catherinecyu.com

Your Voicemail Which Destroyed Me

by Catherine Yu

You called me to tell me he broke up with you over “cultural differences” and not less than a minute later, he was on his knees begging the hostess to go on a date with him, promising her the world. “I’ll take you anywhere,” you said he said. This pandemic makes people shits, or maybe it’s that it makes people fucking nuts in their moral or financial dilemmas. Like the new philosophy of our democracy seems to be “fuck it.” Isn’t that what the looters were about? It’s like a disease, this unfavorable temperance, a trickle-down idiocy that implicates us all, us citizens in captivity, our passports useless since nearly every country in the world has barred our entry to haven. There’s nowhere to go. I’m stuck here, I say. Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere outside of this 300 square feet cage, so yes, I have the time to listen to a five minute voicemail. We shouldn’t have left anyone behind but our government didn’t care and now here we are. What a breach of trust. I’m sorry to the elderly, those in the medical profession, the workers and the delivery boys. We need you, we need each other, these citizens are all this country has, because our institutions have failed us, these crumbling edifices of faded ideologies, I want to tell you. But you’re weeping now.

While you are thinking of ways to burn your former flame, I’m thinking, he’s not worth it. There’s a bigger fight surrounding the air, a fight for ideals near evaporated so you have to hang on to me, we’ll hang on to each other, before we get eviscerated by our hearts, starved by the global food chain and eaten up by acid rain. I’m telling you, the shape of your life is embedded in a revolution by the color of your skin. Don’t make your worth by another’s words. Except this: I love you.

Your Voicemail Which Destroyed Me

Catherine Yu is a writer of plays and librettos. Her plays include Le Jeté (2019 BAPF Semifinalist); The Day is Long to End (2018 University of Florida production); The Things You Tell Yourself and The Sun Experiment (FringeNYC Excellence in Playwriting; Time Out NY’s Top Ten Nightlife and Music Events of the Week in August 2014).

She has been a 2016 NYSCA/NYFA fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, a Soho Rep W/D Lab writer, and a New York Theatre Workshop Emerging Artist of Color. Her short plays have been commissioned by 52nd Street Project, Two Headed Rep and Planned Parenthood among others. Her one-act “A Sand Romance” was a 2016 Heidman Award finalist. Her arts writing has been published by Hyperallergic and her poetry in a Dutch Kills Press 2020 pandemic anthology. She has served as a grants panelist for NYSCA/NYFA, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and Brooklyn Arts Council. As an educator, she has worked as a GED tutor for federal prison inmates, an ESL tutor in China and a tutor to elementary school children. She writes grants for an orchestra .

A New Yorker based in Chicago, she is a 2022-2025 resident playwright with Chicago Dramatists. Commissioned for a libretto by Atlanta Opera in 2023, she is currently working on a libretto for Strange Trace. Her short story collection is supported by a 2023 Illinois Arts Council grant.

Catherine Yu spent her time at MacDowell working on a draft of a museum play with Baroque opera interludes and a screenplay about Ludwig Wittgenstein. The play was created and developed in the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab and received a reading with the Movement Theater Company in November 2016.

Studios

Star

Catherine Yu worked in the Star studio.

Funded by Alpha Chi Omega, a national fraternity founded in 1885, Star Studio — built in 1911–1912 — was the first studio given to the residency by an outside organization. To this day, Alpha Chi sorority pledges learn the story of Star Studio and its role in supporting American arts and letters. Beginning as a nicely proportioned…

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