Join us for LAUNDRY CYCLES, a lively afternoon literary performance and conversation celebrating two new books that look inside neighborhood spaces where the work of laundry gets done.
Author Alvin Eng will read from OUR LAUNDRY, OUR TOWN: My Chinese American Life from Flushing to the Downtown Stage and Beyond, a memoir that decodes and processes the fractured urban oracle bones of his upbringing in Flushing, Queens, in the 1970s. Eng will also present songs and monologues from his acoustic punk raconteur performance piece, HERE COMES JOHNNY YEN AGAIN (or How I Kicked Punk).
“Powerful, funny at times and consistently inspiring… Alvin Eng’s memoir looks back at the past to envision a better future.” David Henry Hwang, playwright
Co-authors Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs will read from HAND BOOK: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry, a collection of writings and images from a performance and film set within New York City laundromats. Their book is a quasi-cinematic encounter, calling to mind the intimacy of touching other people’s clothes, almost like a second skin, the textural care for things kept close to the body. Actor-collaborators Ching Valdez-Aran and Tony Torn will perform from the book’s playscript, a rumination on the convergence of dirt, stains, money, identity, and desire. With clips from Olesker and Sachs’s hybrid documentary THE WASHING SOCIETY.
“A generously kaleidoscopic offering of perspectives, histories and bodies.” Christopher Harris, filmmaker
Alvin Eng is a native NYC author/playwright, songwriter, educator and performer. His plays and performances have been seen Off-Broadway, in Paris, Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China. As a 2024-25 New York Public Library Fellow, he began researching a companion book to his memoir, Our Laundry, Our Town (Fordham University Press).
Lizzie Olesker makes theater reflecting on the politics and poetry of everyday experience, seen in NYC at New Georges, the Cherry Lane, and Public Theater. Her most recent plays include 5 Stages of Grief, Night Shift, and the collaborative Language of Dolls.
Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and poet who investigates the connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. Embracing archives, found images, letters, and journals, her work enacts a critical journey through reality and memory. Her feature film Every Contact Leaves a Trace will have its world premiere at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam in November.
Ching Valdes-Aran is a Filipino-American actress of stage, television, and film, who was trained as a dancer. Her many credits include an international tour of Geoff Sobel’s Home, Lav Diaz’s film From What is Before, and multiple appearances at La Mama, Mabou Mines, and New York Theater Workshop.
Tony Torn is an actor and director with more than 100 stage and screen credits including Ubu Sings Ubu, King Lear, Mud, and In the Solitude of Cotton Fields at Hudson River Park Pier 45. He recently directed the acclaimed play The Whole of Time at Torn Page and the Brick Theater, and is known for his extensive work with legendary experimental theater artists Richard Foreman and Reza Abdoh.