Alex Lin Has Been Building Toward This Moment
Playwright Alex Lin is having a two-show season, including her upcoming Chinese Republicans at Roundabout Theatre Company. Photo: HanJie Chow.
It was 7:45 a.m. when Alex Lin fell to her apartment floor and started crying.
She learned she had made 2026’s Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the Hollywood and Entertainment category.
She called her best friend, the director cara hinh, immediately. “I think I woke her up,” Lin recalls. “And she’s just like, ‘What’s going on, homie?’”
But Forbes isn’t the only spotlight Lin is under right now. Last fall, her play Laowang: A Chinatown King Lear, directed by Joshua Kahan Brody, was produced by Primary Stages at 59E59 Theaters. This winter, Chinese Republicans, directed by Chay Yew and produced by Roundabout Theatre Company, will run from February 5 through April 5 at the Laura Pels Theatre. When was the last time a twenty-something playwright had not one but two world premieres in New York City within the same season?
“I don’t have any pretenses that this is a normal thing that happens,” Lin says from the Manhattan office where she’s currently writing for the upcoming AMC television series The Audacity, while Chinese Republicans rehearses without her. “Very rare. I got very, very lucky.”
But here’s what Lin wants you to know: If she showed you her calendar, the tasks she worked on every day as a playwright year after year, from racking up a word count to applying for every opportunity under the sun, “I think you could start to see how it makes sense.”
The first rehearsal for Chinese Republicans took place three days before our conversation. In that big, bright rehearsal hall at New 42 Studios, surrounded by a full creative team and cast, Lin’s mom was there. This matters so much to Lin because her mom, like many other parents, initially didn’t want her to pursue theater at all. “It’s very meaningful to have my mom show up to the first rehearsal for a show, for a career that she was very afraid for me to go in and commit to,” says Lin.
What most parents would support, however, are day jobs, to which Lin is no stranger. Lin grew up as a biracial child in a science-oriented family in New Jersey. After graduating with a BFA from New York University, she worked in tech for over six years, developing digital content and collaborating with big companies and agencies, including NASA, SpaceX, and Boeing, to bridge the gap between scientific discovery and pop culture.
Besides her dedication to craft on a daily basis, her keen eye for cause and effect gives Lin her superpower as a playwright and how she develops characters. “A leads to B leads to C,” she explains. Anger, sadness, rage, or bad behavior doesn’t just come out of nowhere. “Why do people behave the way that they do?” is the question she asks in her work.
Jully Lee and Anna Zavelson in rehearsal for Chinese Republicans. Photo: HanJie Chow.
Set in the world of corporate finance, Chinese Republicans follows Katie, a rising star at an investment bank, who decides to unionize her affinity group of Chinese American conservative women — her “work aunties” — after she doesn’t get a promotion she’s been preparing for. “Katie goes full-on socialist, but still believing in conservatism in some way,” Lin says. “And of course it causes all this crazy topsy-turvy stuff to happen.”
It’s a premise that could easily tip into caricature, but Lin isn’t interested in mockery. Many family members of hers are Chinese Republicans. “Ever since I was a kid, I always had a different political worldview from them,” she says. “And I can’t go through my life believing that every single person that votes in a way that I disagree with is a megalomaniac sociopath.”
What she’s really exploring with Chinese Republicans is what she calls “complicity by exhaustion”: the idea that people don’t necessarily choose to participate in systems that harm them. Some people are just tired, especially when changes don’t arrive as fast as they age.
Lin chose to set this play in the world of finance not only because she has an understanding from watching her family and friends who work in it, but also because she sees it as an exaggerated example of the larger systems at play in the United States. “It’s all about this type of pressure cooker that we live in this country,” says Lin. “And just an awareness of the fact that when people feel tired, when they feel disillusioned, I think a very human thing that people do is they look towards self-preservation.”
Being a part of the community matters to Lin. During and in the aftermath of COVID, while she was cranking out pages outside of her tech day job, Lin was also building relationships with fellow artists and theater companies. She was sending emails, showing up to readings, dropping in on other creators’ projects — including, in one case, mine — as a performer. She went back to school for playwriting, to Juilliard. She actively built her career by cultivating connections over years, often starting with seemingly small interactions, and by turning every trip, even vacations, into opportunities to engage with theaters in the area.
Similarly, Chinese Republicans itself went through an ecosystem of development: a commission from South Coast Repertory (her very first), a reading at Second Stage Theater (which submitted the play for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, making her a finalist), a revision at the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center that gave the play its current structure, and, finally, Roundabout, bringing it to full production. “Each stage does something very special for the play,” says Lin. “They’re all interconnected and they’ve worked in tandem to elevate this story to another level.”
Chinese Republicans director Chay Yew in rehearsal. Photo: HanJie Chow.
And then there’s director Chay Yew, who has shepherded the play from the beginning. “He was the first person to believe in my work when I wasn’t really taking it seriously yet,” Lin says. “The best tiger mom you could have in your corner. He won’t lie to you, but it will always come out of a place of love and care.”
Both Chinese Republicans and Laowang — Lin’s Chinatown adaptation of King Lear, in which a grandmother fights developers while her mind fails her — feature predominantly, if not fully, Asian casts. Though Lin is thrilled to help bring Asian representation onto the stage, what she really wants is simpler than you might think: “I really want people to have a good time at the theater. I want you guys to be entertained by an interesting story.”
With an equally entertaining premise set in the Silicon Valley tech world, an environment that Lin knows intimately, The Audacity will debut on AMC on April 12, soon after Chinese Republicans concludes its run. While riding high in her career, Lin knows well that the professional breakthroughs she’s enjoyed this season — two world premieres Off-Broadway, one television show, Forbes 30 Under 30 — are something that she has been putting together bit by bit.
No wonder she believes in cause and effect.