“Some wounds don’t close. They change the way we move.”
A dancer who can’t dance spends days wrapped in a bed sheet. A woman and a doctor dig into a troubled past. A man alone wrestles with desire. A stranger carries the weight of a life shaped by war.
With piercing grace, this world premiere follows five lives—intersecting across war zones, bedrooms, and therapy sessions—as they navigate the fragile space between devastation and hope. Each encounter leaves an imprint, drawing a shifting map of connection, disconnection, and the relentless search for healing.
Written by Catherine Yu, In Spite of My Ambivalence is a poetic, unflinching exploration of how we process trauma, how we love in its shadow, and how survival is rarely a straight path.
MEET THE WRITER
Catherine Yu is a writer of plays and librettos. Her plays include In Spite of My Ambivalence (2025 Venturous finalist); Alice Wareham and the Fabulation of Time (2025 Screencraft Stage Play Competition Quarterfinalist); In Love and Friendship (2023 Austin Film Festival Second Round); Le Jeté (2019 BAPF Semifinalist); The Day is Long to End (2018 University of Florida production); and The Sun Experiment (FringeNYC Excellence in Playwriting; Time Out NY’s Top Ten Nightlife and Music Events of the Week in August 2014). She has held fellowships at NYSCA/NYFA, MacDowell, Soho Rep, and New York Theatre Workshop. Her one-act “A Sand Romance” was a 2016 Heidman Award finalist. She has served as a grants panelist for NYSCA/NYFA, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and Brooklyn Arts Council.
As an educator, she has worked as a university lecturer, a GED tutor for federal prison inmates, an ESL tutor in China and a tutor to elementary school children. She writes grants for a museum . A New Yorker based in Chicago, she is a resident playwright with Chicago Dramatists. Catherine was commissioned for librettos by Atlanta Opera and Strange Trace in 2023. Her novel-in-progress was supported by a 2023 Illinois Arts Council grant. She will be a 2025-2026 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University and a Confluence Writers Project Fellow. BA: Stanford University. MFA: New York University.
