Home/The show
The show
One person, one story, ten minutes
The Asian Monologues is a live storytelling show. Each performer takes the stage for about ten minutes and tells one story from their own life — not a script handed to them, and not someone else’s words.
How it works
Every city is cast fresh. The performers change, the stories change, and the evening is built around whoever is standing in that room. What stays the same is the shape of it: short-form, first-person, and told live to an audience that came to listen.
The program centers Their Story, Their Glory, and Their Struggle through artist-led vignettes. Performers are Asian American artists, authors, poets, and community members. Many are not professional actors, and that is the point: the authority of the piece comes from having lived it.
Where it came from
The Asian Monologues was created and directed by Stephanie Reese as a signature program of the Asian Arts & Heritage Festival, presented by Arts & Humanities Bainbridge. The first full production was staged on May 17, 2026 at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art and sold out.
Fifteen storytellers carried that evening. Their stories ran from wartime incarceration and the long fight to reclaim citizenship, to adoption, migration, poetry, first loves, and a table built in a camp that a family kept for generations. That production is archived here in full.
Where it is going
The show is built to travel. Every city is cast fresh, so a production in Seattle or San Francisco will not be a touring copy of Bainbridge — it will be that city’s own people telling that city’s own stories, in the same form.
Seattle and San Francisco are both in development. Neither has confirmed dates.
The name
The Asian Monologues™ is a claimed trademark. See the trademark notice for how the name may and may not be used.