Seeing is not necessarily an exit.
Clarity is not necessarily freedom.
Love is not justification.
Understanding is not arrival.
WHO GETS
TO DECIDE?
A staged reading of THE CHILD and APPROPRIATE
The first iteration of this workshop development happened on Sunday, July 26, 2026 from 3:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. in Studio 180 at the University of Waterloo, Ontario.
Written and Directed by Vivian Wang
Dramaturgy by Andy Houston
About the Project
Who Gets to Decide? brings together two plays concerned with intimacy, interpretation, authority, and the gradual disappearance of the individual within structures that may appear loving, rational, or necessary.
The work does not ask audiences simply to understand the characters. It asks them to recognize the systems of interpretation in which they themselves participate.
In THE CHILD, an intimate experience is translated into institutional language, professional judgment, and competing interpretations until the person at the centre of the experience begins to lose authority over what happened to them.
In APPROPRIATE, the process of editing a manuscript gradually becomes a model for intimacy itself. A writer learns to refine, remove, and reorganize not only her work, but eventually herself.
Together, the plays ask a more difficult question: if love, understanding, and good intentions are all present, can a person still be required to diminish themselves in order for a relationship, institution, or narrative to remain coherent?
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Adopted at fourteen, a child enters a relationship with their guardian.
It crosses a line.
The police intervene.
The story is decided.
Except by the one who lived it.
THE CHILD does not ask the audience to determine whether the relationship constitutes love. Instead, it traces the process through which judgment is produced, and the ways lived experience is translated through language, expertise, procedure, and institutional interpretation.
When everything has been recorded, interpreted, classified, and archived, something may still remain that cannot be verified, yet continues to exist.
Cast
Helayna Panagos, Narrator
Ethan Warren, Expert A
Linus Ma, Expert B -
A writer and her editor, who is also her lover, move through three conversations about a manuscript.
At first, his edits seem helpful. He cuts what wanders, clarifies what is difficult, and teaches the work how to become more coherent, more publishable, and more appropriate. His judgments are precise, gentle, and often right. They begin to sound almost indistinguishable from care.
As the manuscript approaches completion, the writer notices that the same editorial logic has begun operating on her. She hesitates less. Removes more. Learns which feelings interrupt the structure, which questions are inconvenient, and which parts of herself can be left out without anyone noticing.
Nothing dramatic destroys the relationship. No one needs to become cruel.
By the end, she has simply become extraordinarily good at editing herself.
APPROPRIATE asks what happens when love does not silence a person through force, but teaches them, patiently and convincingly, which parts of themselves no longer belong.
Cast
Jasmine Ward, A, the Author
Kevin White, B, the Editor
About Vivian Wang
Vivian Wang is a director, playwright, and performer whose artistic practice began in 2018. Her work spans theatre directing, playwriting, performance, production across multiple theatrical roles, voice acting and voice direction, as well as directing and performing in short films.
She is drawn to experimental theatre, though she does not consider experimentation a genre. Theatre that merely reproduces familiar forms has abandoned part of its responsibility. Every theatrical work should test something: the limits of language, the instability of perspective, the relationship between performer and audience, or the assumptions through which reality is organized. Theatre should not simply tell a story. It should alter the conditions under which that story can be perceived.
Her work examines intimacy, interpretation, power, memory, and the ways individuals can disappear inside structures that appear loving, rational, or necessary. She resists narratives that depend on clear villains, clean moral categories, or the promise that greater understanding will necessarily produce resolution. She is more interested in what remains when everyone has reasons, everyone believes they are acting with care, and harm is still produced.
Her recent dramatic works include THE CHILD and APPROPRIATE, presented together in the staged reading Who Gets to Decide? at the University of Waterloo.
About Vivian’s
company
UNIT ZERØ
UNIT ZERØ creates experimental theatre about questionable decisions, competing versions of the truth, and people trying to stay normal when things get weird.
Contact
jingnan.wangjn@outlook.com