Yide Cai: Steeped(品)

Steeped(品) is a metatheatrical play that reimagines the Boston Tea Party from the perspective of the tea itself — a leaf that refuses to be a lifeless symbol but rather faces its death. It is set on the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, where two actors are rehearsing a new Boston production about the Tea Party written by a playwright based in New York. One night, the tea puppet they are playing as a prop speaks to them, and tells them that it is the tea lying at the bottom of Boston Harbor for the past 250 years, plucked from a tree in China, processed, shipped, commodified, and ultimately dumped into the sea.

Encouraged by the tea, the actors begin staging a revolution of their own—questioning their playwright, resisting the regional-to-Broadway development pipeline, and demanding independence from the theater industry apparatus that profits from their labor. Yet their ambition for recognition threatens to sabotage the very freedom they seek. Amid this unraveling, Tea pushes for the control of its own fate, not to win an ideological battle, but to escape eternal symbolism and finally live, and die, as something human rather than a prop in someone else’s myth.

This workshop production of Steeped(品) will take place in Boston, a city that still harbors the myth the play interrogates. Presented as an in-progress, site-responsive staging, and designed for flexible, nontraditional spaces, the performance will unfold among the audience, collapsing rehearsal and performance. Two actors as ensemble will play multiple roles while jointly voicing and manipulating a single tea puppet that exists between them, so that movement and choreography will propel the storytelling. In the city where revolution is continually reenacted and commemorated, the production asks what it means to restage that history now, and who gets to speak when the symbol speaks back.

Open Rehearsals: Sept 18 & 19, 4-8 PM 

Workshop Performance: Sept 20, 3-6 PM