A moving journey of an ESEA family that invites tears, laughter, and reflection at the same time
How do we mend relationships that’s already torn apart? How does love change shape across time?
Katie Đỗ’s new play Love You Long Time (Already) explores these questions through the story of Mai (Tuyen Do) and her daughter Tâm (Molly Harris), spanning decades. It traces the life of an East Asian migrant family in the United States, confronting both the painful and beautiful realities of ESEA domestic life. Katie Đỗ’s writing is funny, poignant, and honest. Her characters are deeply flawed and painfully familiar. Audiences laugh because they recognise their own families in these characters, and cry for the same reason. It is questionable whether some melodramatic choices within the family narrative helps to ground the audience within the characters’ journeys, but the story nevertheless delivers heartbreaking moments and a genuinely affecting message that reminds us how family, despite everything, continues to hold us together and shape us as who we are.
Director Jenny Tang seamlessly weaves this decades-spanning family history through a single living-room set with torn paper walls, designed by TK Hay. Under Dam Van Huynh’s movement direction, the production is pulsed with movements stylized yet still highly precise to the characters’ physical reality and psychological states.
Tuyen Do and Molly Harris’ performances are highlights of the production. Their truthful, layered performances make the central mother-daughter relationship deeply relatable and profoundly human. Tuyen Do’s portrayal of Mai is phenomenal. As a young woman, Mai’s girlishness and idealism suit her unwavering belief in love. As she grows older, she becomes protective, anxious, and consumed by anguish, a figure instantly recognisable in many Asian households. Tuyen not only delivers a richly layered performance but also reveals the woman before motherhood: her dreams, romantic fantasies, and the experiences that shaped the mother she eventually became. The scene where Mai was asked for a divorce is devastating, precisely because of how Tuyen transformed Mai into a flawed yet highly relatable human being on stage.
Molly Harris brings a grounded, effortless sincerity from the moment she steps onstage, anchoring the play through its many melodramatic turns. She renders Tâm a quality that makes even the character’s mistakes feel relatable and believable. Having already demonstrated his remarkable versatility in Scenes from Repatriation, Jon Chew once again delivers a highly credible characterisation as Long, Mai’s unfaithful husband. Comparatively, Zheng Xi Yong, who plays Tâm’s first love, Huy, feels mechanical and overly theatrical at moments.
Love You Long Time (Already) is a truthful exploration of an ESEA family through love, betrayal, and reconciliation and a production that invites tears, laughter, and reflection at the same time. It will be performed at Theatre 503 until 25th July.