LOVE YOU LONG TIME (ALREADY) at Theatre503 2 – 25 July 2026
‘beautifully mundane and painfully familiar’ ★★★★★
There comes a moment when you realise that your parents are not simply your parents, but people. People like you. Soon afterwards, another moment follows: they begin to ask the questions, and you begin to care for them. The relationship quietly reverses. It slowly crumbles your heart. Is this what it means to grow old, or simply to become an adult?
Love You Long Time explores a mother enduring hardship, a father trying to escape, daughters carrying inherited burdens, and pain passed down in silence. Following a Vietnamese family who migrated to the United States, it is not only a play about cultural identity, but about women and the intergenerational sisterhood between mother and daughter.
People often say that mother-daughter relationships are difficult, but in many East and Southeast Asian families, the pressure to be a “good girl” can train women to tolerate pain rather than name it. This becomes even more complicated when customs, beliefs and old ways of surviving lose their usefulness in a new environment, while memories remain like cookies left too long in a mould: retaining their shape but becoming increasingly fragile.
It takes considerable skill to find humour in material that could easily become sentimental and depressing. The mother’s repeated references to church and Christianity are especially effective, capturing something both specific and recognisable about many Asian American migrant families. Her faith is habitual and comforting, but also quietly comic.
Katie Do’s writing is beautifully observed, and Jennifer Tang directs with care and precision. Cheng Keng’s lighting and Elena Peña’s sound are subtle but effective, while TK Hay’s papier-mâché walls create the sense that memory, time and physical space are crumpling together. The more emotionally intense a memory is, the more fragile it seems to become.
The ensemble works seamlessly. Jon Chew’s portrait of Long is frustratingly real, while Tuyen Do gives Mai the anger, endurance and familiarity of an Asian mother without reducing her to a type. Molly Harris traces the daughter’s emotional growth, and Zheng Xi Yong supports the scenes with precision.
The most moving moment comes when Mai no longer recognises her own daughter. Freed, however painfully, from the roles of mother and child, they communicate simply as one woman speaking to another. The loss is devastating, but it also reveals a new kind of intimacy.
Everything in the play is beautifully mundane and painfully familiar to anyone raised in an Asian household of that generation, where a high tolerance for pain is almost expected. The repetition, obligation, religion, irritation and unspoken care feel exhaustingly familiar. These mundane details are what our lives are made of, and they deserve to be heard.
BOX OFFICE https://theatre503.com/whats-on/love-you-long-time-already/
Writer: Katie Do
Director: Jennifer Tang (Cymbeline, Shakespeare’s Globe)
Cast: Jon Chew (The Good Person of Szechuan, Lyric Hammersmith), Tuyen Do (Shadow and Bone, Netflix), Molly Harris (Measure for Measure, Donmar) and Zheng Xi Yong (American Psycho, Almeida).
Creative team: TK Hay (Set / Costume Design), Cheng Keng (Lighting Design), Elena Peña (Sound Design), Dam Van Huynh (Movement Director), Polly Jerrold (Casting Director), Ellen Rey de Castro (Costume Supervisor) and Zoe Zimin Ho (Voice and Dialect Coach), working in association with The Sông Collective, who are also providing cultural consultancy.
Photography: Ikin Yum
