Two years ago, the original student play “Ugly Feelings,” penned by then-senior Karina L. Cowperthwaite ’23, premiered at the Loeb Experimental Theater under the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club (HRDC). On March 8 and 9 this year, “Ugly Feelings” reemerged — with parts rewritten and added, but still an exploration of multiracial belonging at its heart — as a professional staged reading at the Boston Center for the Arts.

This reading of “Ugly Feelings” was the culmination of Cowperthwaite’s months-long collaboration with Fresh Ink Theatre Company and CHUANG Stage under their New Work Development Residency. The residency supports a new play with an internal workshop and a public staged reading, pairing the playwright with a professional director and dramaturg in the process.

Cowperthwaite worked with director Sarah Shin and dramaturg Annie Wang, regularly brainstorming and workshopping pages of the script with a renewed sense of structure.

“It was my first experience outside of college, outside of an academic institution, working with other theater professionals to think about how my show could continue to explore these questions of identity further,” Cowperthwaite said in an interview with The Crimson.

“Ugly Feelings” takes audiences through various vignettes — from “My Best Friend Gets a Boyfriend and I’m Feeling Homicidal” to “Asian Girl Bake Sale” — in multiracial Chinese-American Jenny’s (Jillian Sun) experience of teenage angst, fantasy, and belonging while growing up in a predominantly white suburb.

“This was something I was really passionate about in college — thinking about how theater could be used as this tool to think about what representation was in theater for Asian-American identities, how theater can be used as a tool to create space for those identities, how theater can be used as a tool to tell stories that we maybe don’t consume every day,” Cowperthwaite said.

“Ugly Feelings” started out as Cowperthwaite’s senior thesis project for her joint English and Theater, Dance & Media degree. She co-directed it as a fully fledged HRDC production in April 2023, while also starring as Jenny.

“Writing and directing were very intertwined for me during that artistic process, but one of the things I actually wanted to challenge for myself in this process [of the residency], which was exciting, was how to let go of your art and trust it in someone else’s hands,” Cowperthwaite said.

As co-president of Harvard’s Asian Student Arts Project (ASAP) during her undergraduate years, Cowperthwaite notably directed the first show with an all-Asian cast at Harvard: “Legally Blonde” in 2021. Since graduation, she has assistant directed American Repertory Theater productions “Romeo and Juliet” and “WILD: A Musical Becoming” under Diane M. Paulus ’88.

Two cast members from the original Harvard production — Avery L. Hansberger ’25, who played Jenny’s twin brother George, and Crystal X. Manyloun ’26, who played Jenny’s friend and dog Orlando — reprised their roles at the professional reading. Hansberger pointed out the greater emphasis on a fish-in-a-fish-bowl metaphor as perhaps the biggest change to the script as he saw it. Himself being multiracial, his discussions with Cowperthwaite shaped her writing of George.

“I think the idea of so much of this world being crafted through Jenny’s perception, and George, at times, being more real than some of the other characters but then simultaneously existing through this view of Jenny, has been something that I think has been changing and morphing as Karina has worked,” Hansberger said.

However, older cast members were a new addition to the production, including Alex Jacobs as Lloyd, who is Jenny’s white father but also her therapist and the boy she has a crush on in fifth grade, and Karla Goo Lang as Lauren, who is Jenny’s Chinese mother but also her best friend.

“I really was interested in this idea of Jenny through the lens of her mind that we’re seeing in the story, and her obsessiveness to racialize everything in her life into this binary: white and Asian,” Cowperthwaite said.

The specificity of the portrayal of being simultaneously white and non-white is part of what makes the play so special, allowing it to “[explore] questions that otherwise haven’t been explored,” in Hansberger’s words. Audiences at the two readings included many Asian Americans who perhaps saw, at once, a highly relatable and utterly unique identity in Jenny’s story.

“Because of that, it seemed like people were really enjoying the content,” Hansburger said.

The journey of Cowperthwaite’s play from Harvard’s campus to the broader Boston theater scene gives aspiring student playwrights or directors — including Manyloun, who calls Cowperthwaite her “biggest role model” — hope. CHUANG Stage itself serves as a key center for Asian-American theatermaking in Boston, somewhat of a professional extension to undergraduate theater organizations like ASAP.

To Manyloun, working with older actors with full-time day jobs who have found the time to pursue theater after graduation is also “really inspiring.”

“It’s just cool to see a Harvard show actually go out into the real world,” Manyloun said.

“Ugly Feelings” ran at the Boston Center for the Arts on March 8 and 9.

—Staff writer Isabelle A. Lu can be reached at isabelle.lu@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @IsabelleALu.