Drawing parallels between two classic tales, Cinderella and Frankenstein’s Monster Are Dead explores a Chinese exchange student’s struggle to adapt to American culture, and her desire to fit in. Zhao Lan is a student at a Miami high school living with a host family with Chinese heritage. When the school drama club announces it will be performing Cinderella, she is desperate to prove herself, but finds that she misses the Mandarin rhymes she used to sing proudly.

Before the show’s run starts, we spoke to writer and director Langyue Petunia Hu to find out more about it.

Can you start by telling me a bit about Cinderella and Frankenstein’s Monster Are Dead?

The play follows 昭兰 (Zhao Lan), a Chinese exchange student in the United States who relates to Frankenstein’s monster because she constantly feels awkward and out of place. When her school drama club stages Cinderella, she auditions, hoping it might finally help her feel accepted. But as she struggles with language, belonging and the pressure to change herself to fit in, she starts to question whether she’s been chasing the wrong story all along.

What inspired you to create the show?

The creative process actually started with two images. The first was a girl sitting beneath a magical tree, reaching toward a white bird that might drop a beautiful gown if she wished for it. The second was this creature — the so-called monster — crouched beneath another tree, also reaching upward, fascinated by things that are considered “beautiful” or “natural.” When I saw those images side by side, I realized how similar Cinderella and Frankenstein actually are. They’re both stories about outsiders longing to be loved and accepted, but one is rewarded with a fairytale ending while the other is pushed toward violence and tragedy.

I’ve always loved Western classical literature and fairy tales, so I became interested in what might happen if those two stories collided. But while working on it, I kept coming back to the question of where someone like me fit inside those narratives.

That’s where Zhao Lan came from. She’s shaped a lot by my own experience of feeling caught between Chinese and American culture. Through her, I wanted to create a gothic fairytale for people who don’t usually get to see themselves reflected in these kinds of stories.

What response do you hope that the audience will have to your show?

We’re making this show for people who have gone through immigration systems, and for anyone who has had to learn a new language while feeling pressure to leave their old one behind. We hope the show gives people permission to reconnect with the parts of themselves they may have hidden just to fit in. I’m still learning how to do that myself while writing this piece and I hope theatre can be the place where we practice together.

If you could choose one song as the soundtrack for your show, what would it be and why?

It’d probably be ‘In Another Life’ by Son Lux. It is part of the score for Everything Everywhere All at Once, directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. After an entire film of Evelyn Wang jumping through all these extravagant, dazzling parallel universes, the music suddenly becomes really quiet, and we’re just left with her: a Chinese American immigrant who remains the constant underneath every “better” version of herself. Then there’s Waymond’s line: “In another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you.” That moment brings the whole movie back to a story about love and the ordinary.

I think Kwan and Scheinert capture the undertones of immigration beautifully because it can feel like a constant confrontation with the question of “what if?” What if another country, another language, another life? Throughout Cinderella and Frankenstein’s Monster Are Dead, Zhao Lan keeps trying to position herself at the extremes of who she could be: princess or monster, beautiful or grotesque, acceptable or alien. But by the end, she realizes she just wants to be seen as human. She is loved and she is enough.

Cinderella and Frankenstein’s Monster Are Dead will be performed at theSpace Triplex from 7-29 August as part of Edinburgh Fringe.

Words by Ellen Leslie