Kristina Wong’s new comedy show recalls how her Covid drove to make masks for people who needed them mushroomed into a L.A. project in which she was the “Sweatshop Overlord.” Courtesy of Kristina Wong.That may be the lesson of “Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord,” the acclaimed solo show now playing at American Conservatory Theater’s Strand Theater.
“The thing that I had fought to do my whole life, which is make theater and solo performance, was now something that could potentially infect and kill all my audience members,” Wong recalls. “I decided to add people to the group who I knew were sewing as well, and a lot of them happened to be Asian women,” Wong says. “I pulled my mother into the group, and my mother pulled her friends into the group. There was an exchange between two aunties in the group, one who’s Korean and one who’s Chinese. They both had mothers who were garment workers, and they were comparing memories of what this was bringing up for them, because they used to help their mothers with piecework.
The show’s live premiere at New York Theatre Workshop in late 2021 was Wong’s first in-person performance since all this began. The show went on to win Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel awards and was one of two finalists for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.