M&M ARTS AND PRODUCTIONS PRESENTS THE LIFTIST, A DARK COMEDY ON SANITATION AS A HUMAN RIGHT— OPENING JUNE 7 AT THE LOS ANGELES LGBT CENTER

The Liftist

Playwrights Amy Dong and Mason Ma deliver a three-act original that follows one woman’s bathroom dispute across three decades — from South Pasadena in 2004, to Manhattan at Christmas 2018, to a dystopian AI-surveilled quarantine ward in 2038.

LOS ANGELES — It starts with a wet toilet seat. It ends with a woman bashing open a hospital door with a detached toilet lid…wait, I shouldn’t spoil the end. But within 75 minutes, The Liftist asks the questions around the taboo: why do women still perform most house chores when they earn as much as their male counterpart? Nora has left the house long ago.

Producer Lucy Ma and associate producer Julie Zhu bring the production to the Davidson/Valentini Theatre at the Los Angeles LGBT Center, five performances only, June 7 through 15. Their collaboration through M&M Arts and Productions Inc. marks an original work built entirely from the ground up.

Director Zhi Qu and dramaturg Xuelai Han shape the script by playwrights Amy Dong and Mason Ma into a tightly calibrated three-act arc that earns its ambition: the first act is a family comedy, crisp and very Asian-American in the best way; the second a relationship drama with real political stakes; the third a full-on speculative satire complete with a sentient AI toilet named Dylan, a SkyGPT dystopia, and an in-dream Toilet King sequence that lands, somehow, as the most emotionally resonant scene in the show.

The physical world of The Liftist is built by lighting designer Tilda Mingyo Seo, scenic and props designer Siyin Yan, scenic coordinator Arushi Kejariwal, set dresser Aje Soberekon, costume and makeup designer Nuoyan Guan, and sound and music designer Silvan Tang — together creating three distinct theatrical environments that span a 1990s Southern California living room, a New York apartment dressed for Christmas, and a near-future hospital room that is as plausible as it is horrifying.

What makes The Liftist quietly radical is not just what it says but who is saying it. The production is led almost entirely by Asian and Asian-American women — in the writer’s room, behind the spreadsheets, in design, and on stage. M&M Arts and Productions has built its work around a deliberate commitment to centering Asian-American voices, and in particular the experiences of Asian women, whose inner lives have long been flattened or sidelined in mainstream American theater. Our protagonist Ashley Chu is not a supporting character in someone else’s story. She is not defined by her ethnicity as an obstacle or her womanhood as a footnote. She is the whole show — sharp, complicated, sometimes wrong, always fighting — and the team that built her reflects exactly that intention. When a room full of Asian women decides to make theater about who cleans the toilet, it is not a small domestic comedy. It is a statement about whose labor gets seen, whose stories get told, and who gets to be the hero of the mess.

At the center of all three acts is Ashley Chu, played by Jingyao Zhao — a character impossible not to root for at every age. In Act I, she is a sharp, resourceful teenage daughter negotiating the terms of domestic labor with her firefighter father Bob, played by John Jiang, while her best friend Zoey, played by Summer Xia, serves as the reluctant witness to every escalation. The one who took credit for inventing the flushable toilet, Thomas Crapper, played by Yuchen Zhou, makes a surreal cameo to deliver the show’s central thesis with the authority of a man who has literally lived inside a toilet. In Act II, Ashley returns as a Manhattan attorney, now engaged to Jason, played by Yuchen Zhou, whose endearing man-child energy papers over a deeper conflict about labor, dignity, and who exactly is holding the household together. Act III strips all that away: Ashley is alone in a quarantine ward, sparring with Dylan, the AI toilet voiced by Shuwen Pan — an entity that is at once the show’s funniest character and its most pointed argument about what happens when systems designed to serve us start giving us orders instead.

“I sat in the corner and watched them, and I kept wondering: did they make their own breakfast this morning? Do they iron their own shirts? Are their wives at home with the kids while they’re out having a blast?.” — The Liftist

Marketing for the production is led by marketing director Rose Li and marketing coordinator Yuxuan Zhou. Tickets and information are available at @theliftistplay on Instagram and via QR code in all promotional materials.

PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE
Sunday, June 7 — 5:00 PM
Tuesday, June 9 — 7:30 PM
Saturday, June 13 — 3:15 PM
Sunday, June 14 — 1:30 PM
Monday, June 15 — 7:30 PM

VENUE
Davidson/Valentini Theatre
Los Angeles LGBT Center
1125 North McCadden Place, Los Angeles, CA 90038