
Lauren Yee just might be the playwright of the moment. If you go to her webpage, you will see a list of nearly seventy awards, accolades and laurels Yee has accumulated over the past eighteen years or so:
“She is the winner of the Doris Duke Artist Award, the Steinberg Playwright Award, the Horton Foote Prize, the Kesselring Prize, the ATCA/Steinberg Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters literature award, and the Francesca Primus Prize. She has been a finalist for the Edward M. Kennedy Prize and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Her plays were the #1 and #2 plays on the 2017 Kilroys List.”

And she was the Bay Area Playwrights Festival winner for her play Samsara, which opens Saturday in Portland in a production by Profile Theatre at the Artists Rep space, where it continues through Feb. 9 as Profile continues its deep dive into Yee’s work.

Samsara is an older play for Yee, first produced at Victory Gardens in Chicago in 2015, and she’d been workshopping it since 2009. Like much of Yee’s work, Samsara deals with the prickly, messy places where cultures collide, the complexities of family dynamics, and that moment when fully-grown humans reach for self-actualization.
“I’m really interested in adult coming-of-age stories,” she says, “people coming into their own.” And as in all of Yee’s work, she deals in Samsara with these topics with a unique mix of wit, compassion, fantasy, and playful theatricality. “I have an interest in showing the audience a good time, in making them laugh and making them feel; pulling the rug out from underneath them and showing them something they haven’t seen before,” she says.
Samsara tells the story of a type of family that didn’t exist before the 21st century. A young American couple is trying to have children, but can’t, so they seek to use a surrogate. But surrogacy, it turns out, is expensive, so they look across the world to find an option they can afford.

“When I started working on the play in the late 2000s,” Yee recalls, “in the news, the surrogacy ban had just been lifted in India. There was this suddenly very active surrogacy industry happening, and the rules around it and the ethics and the system were all being worked out on the fly. I remember when I was telling other Americans about this, the response was always, ‘Ooh, there’s something morally gray and challenging in this,’ even though from the surrogacy industry’s perspective everybody gets what they want.
“Couples who couldn’t have babies have biological babies that they want, the surrogates are able to build up a nest egg for whatever they want. It serves everyone, and yet I think there’s always some sort of cringe or something gnawing at them. I think that’s because of the legacy of colonialism, and there’s this question of the commodification of pregnant bodies. I think also there are all sorts of fraught feelings about what it is to have a child and how much the environments and circumstances in our minds influences a child.”
Samsara deals with this latter question in Yee’s typically atypical way. Her play’s surrogate mother, Suraiya, is often isolated and alone. Yee had to find someone for her to interact with.
“By the nature of this surrogacy industry,” says Yee, “you are taken to these birthing centers where you may not know any of the people there who are other birthing parents, and you are forced to sit and wait for the baby to come. So, there’s this inherent loneliness, right? This act that is usually surrounded by community, is, in surrogacy, done fairly siloed. I was like, ‘Oh, she needs someone to talk to. She may not trust the environment that she’s in. She may not feel comfortable with the other mothers around her. She’s gonna talk to the unborn child within her,’ was the seed of that.”
A different playwright would have felt the need to make this strange relationship a profound, tender, moving one, and Yee does, but not in the way the audience expects.
“It was fun to go against the grain of what you might imagine that relationship to be like, that it is funny and prickly,” she says, “and as a defense mechanism when she first meets this vision of this unborn child, she’s like, ‘I don’t like you. I am ready to get you out of me and get my money and go,’ and the unexpected thing that happens is that there’s this bond that forms between them.”

In that relationship is explored the question of nature vs. nurture, and a question, ever more pertinent, about the definition of motherhood. At one point, Suraiya tells the unborn child that he is not, in fact, her child; she is not his mother. “You’re my lungs, you’re my blood,” says Amit, the baby, “how can I not be a part of you? You might not be the sperm and the egg that made me, but your body gave life to me.’”
Much of the play centers on the imaginative life of the women and what that reveals about how they are being affected by the events in their real lives.
“Samsara is a play that introduces all these people in this state of active daydreaming,” says Yee. “Basically, it’s about a bunch of people waiting for a child to be born. What was fun for me was trying to tell the story of this very strange, quasi-family almost, that is in different parts of the globe. I’m telling this of this couple that is on different sides of the world as they’re experiencing the same event, the impending birth of their child and how that causes them to be on totally different wavelengths in terms of where they are mentally. And then also in the play you get this strange Frenchman that shows up, this fantasy figure, and you’re like, ‘I wonder why he is here?’ and it’s another leg to this table. There’s America, there’s this fantasy space with the Frenchman, there’s the real surrogate in India who also has this dreamspace with the unborn child within her, so you have this story that’s told in lots of different spaces.”
Since Samsara received its first full production in 2015, a lot has changed in Lauren Yee’s life. She branched out and started writing for television and film. And perhaps most significantly, Yee became a mother herself. “In a way,” she says, “Samsara was about my anxieties about what it would be like to be a parent, as someone who always saw myself with kids. I was thinking about what that transition might look like in my own life.”
Another question Samsara asks is how necessary it is to be physically in the place where one’s life is happening, perhaps a uniquely 21st century question, and one that Yee is more aware of as a mom.
“Before kids I went every single place you could think of in relationship to my theatre career,” she says. “One of the big joys of my work was being able to go to places like Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, and really be able to make work with the people who live there, in the communities that were out there and it was a big part of my identity. My kids bring me joy, but it’s a very different life now that I’m a parent. I don’t get to travel as much, and I am dreaming about what might be going on in a place that I can’t get to. It’s hard but it’s wonderful to know that the work lives on outside of me.”

Profile Theatre has previously produced King of the Yees, is now producing Samsara, and later in the year will bring to the stage Yee’s latest work, Mother Russia.
“Mother Russia,” explains Yee, “is a play that happens in that transition period [when the Russians were] between having been communist for a very long time and then all of a sudden you are a capitalist society. What does that mean? And the absurd panic of it. You open the door and you’re like, ‘There’s a McDonald’s next door. What’s a McDonald’s?’ Or you’re like, ‘Now there are multiple brands of toothpaste. So now we need ads for toothpaste. And how do I choose? You used to go to the store and there was one toothpaste. Now there are twenty and I don’t know which one is the best.’
“And so, to me, that reflects Russia in 1992 but it is also an examination of capitalist American culture and that overwhelm of what capitalism is. In 1992 they had people who were like, ‘Capitalism is coming. Democracy is here. Free speech. This is gonna make everything better.’ As Americans I think we can say, ‘That is much more difficult in practice than you think it is.’”
Between Samsara and Mother Russia, much has changed in Yee’s work, even as other aspects have only become more pronounced and refined.
“In recent times,” she explains, “I’ve drifted more towards history, looking back at the past, as a way to look at our now. I think there is always a heightened sense to my plays, but I think there isn’t a strain of fantasy in the way that in Samsara is literally about imagination and imaginary characters. In Mother Russia there’s a heightened 1992 St. Petersburg,but it is a more realistic setting than Samsara. But it’s still something that tries to find light in very dark places. It explores relationships of parents and children.”
The concept of samsara, as Suraiya in the play says, is “the cycle of life. Nothing ever goes away. It just gets reborn somewhere else.” In the play, that’s not just human lives but learning, ideas, attitudes, culture.
All theater deals with this fundamental idea to a greater or lesser degree. It is a basic building block of the art form. “ When you’re a playwright you get to dream big,” says Yee. “You’re like, ‘If you all want to build it over here, go build it over here, and if you want to build it over there you build it over there. You get to see different versions of it. You get to see it interact with present-day time. This play was done in 2025 Portland and it was also done in 2015 in Chicago at Victory Gardens and the play gets to be different each time. I’m excited for Profile audiences to experience that.”
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