PLAY:A Play, performance, 70 minutes

PLAY: A Play is a conceptual performance structured as a game that playfully exposes the contradictions of freedom and authority, individuality and interdependence, control and surrender. Six Players, under the watchful eye of a Coach and a relentlessly ticking clock, navigate a shifting set of rules—some absurd, others surprisingly familiar—that reveal the invisible systems that govern power, behavior, and care.

PLAY is unscripted; the work emerges in real time from the Players’ instincts, negotiations, failures, and discoveries, making every performance distinct and porous. Designed to be rebuilt wherever it lands, PLAY adapts its set, sound, lighting, and cast to local contexts, transforming into a living, ever-evolving system rather than a fixed work.

Both a performance rooted in the present and a rehearsal for the future, PLAY cultivates attention, trust, and collective imagination. It asks what becomes possible when people act together and proposes collaboration and improvisation as a radical, embodied experiment in how we might live together differently.

When in doubt, play.

Presented at The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (MOCA) as part of Wonmi’s WAREHOUSE Program.

Conception: Emily Mast
Core Players: Hugo Armstrong, Gregory Barnett, Jessica Emmanuel, Jessica Hemingway
The Coach: Emily Mast
The Composer: Maxwell Transue
The Illuminator: Chu-Hsuan Chang
The Mascot: Aramazd Stepanian
Costumes, Sets & Props: Allison Honeycutt, Emily Mast, Jill Spector
Promo Photos: Betsy Lin Seder
Graphic Design: Luiza Dale
Associate curator: Alex Sloane
Producer: Amelia Charter
Stage Manager: Candy Yi
AV Manager: Calvin Anderson
AV Technicians: Kern Haug, Matthew Munoz, Jack Williams
Support: Wonmi & Kihong Kwon and Family, MOCA Fund for Performance, Betsy Greenberg & the Lenore S. and Bernard A. Greenberg Fund

PLAY: A Play was initially devised with: Andrew Lush, Aramazd Stepanian, Gregory Barnett, Jessica Emmanuel, Lisa McNeely, and Terrence Luke Johnson.