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AWDPI Successfully Hosts Online Script Reading of The Dream of Being a Madame
The Dream of Being a Madam
Playwright Dr Qi Wang
As an organisation dedicated to supporting the rights, wellbeing, and development of Asian women overseas, AWDPI has long sought to create spaces where women’s voices can be heard, their lived experiences recognised, and their stories treated as matters of public and cultural importance. This workshop was part of that wider commitment. Through theatre, AWDPI invited participants not only to encounter a dramatic text, but also to reflect on the social expectations, emotional negotiations, and personal choices that shape women’s lives across cultures.
Written by playwright Qi Wang, The Dream of Being a Madame is a contemporary play exploring female identity, desire, life choices, and independence. Centred on the question “To become a lady — or to become yourself?”, the play examines the roles women are asked to perform and the selves they struggle, imagine, and choose to become.
The event was warmly received by participants and created a thoughtful, open space for discussion. Through script reading and guided conversation, the workshop encouraged audiences to consider questions of womanhood, autonomy, intimacy, social judgement, family expectation, and self-definition. The text resonated strongly with participants because it speaks to experiences that are at once personal and collective: the desire to be loved, the pressure to conform, the cost of independence, and the courage required to claim one’s own life.
More than a reading, the evening became a shared act of listening and questioning. It demonstrated how theatre can move beyond performance to become a form of social dialogue — one that allows complex experiences to be voiced, witnessed, and reconsidered. By presenting The Dream of Being a Madame in an accessible online format, AWDPI enabled a wider audience to engage with women-centred storytelling and with the urgent questions it raises.
Playwright Qi Wang is known for her cross-cultural theatrical practice and her sustained interest in women’s narratives, adaptation, identity, and social roles. In addition to The Dream of Being a Madame, her works include A Nora’s House, a feminist reimagining that responds to Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and reconsiders women’s relationship to domestic space, sacrifice, and self-determination. Her wider creative portfolio also includes projects such as Painted Skin, Nightmare, reflecting her interest in adaptation, intercultural storytelling, and the transformation of classic and contemporary materials for the stage.
The success of the workshop reflects the continuing importance of creating cultural spaces where Asian women’s experiences, and women’s experiences more broadly, can be articulated with nuance and dignity. In bringing together theatre, feminist inquiry, and community dialogue, AWDPI reaffirmed its commitment to supporting conversations that challenge silence, expand visibility, and open new ways of understanding identity and independence.
Through The Dream of Being a Madame, participants were invited to ask not only what it means to become “a lady”, but what it means to become oneself. The evening closed with a renewed sense of the power of theatre to connect individual stories with wider social questions — and to make space for women’s voices to be heard on their own terms.
Qi Wang
Wordtide Theatre
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