Golden Shield Tickets

By: Anchuli Felicia King
Director: Danya Taymor

Anchuli Felicia King's Golden Shield, a play about family, language, and government conspiracy, makes its American premiere with Manhattan Theatre Club at New York City Center. Get Golden Shield tickets on TodayTix.

The Golden Shield play is half legal drama, half family drama, focusing on an international political issue through the lens of two sisters embroiled in it. Julie Chen is an American lawyer who files a class-action lawsuit against an American tech company for alleged collusion with the Chinese government. She's gotten a Chinese dissident to testify in court, but she doesn't speak Mandarin, so she hires her sister Eva as her translator.

Julie and Eva haven't seen each other in a long time, and they've never seen eye to eye, thus growing apart over the years. Before they can worry about literally speaking and understanding the same language to win the case, they have to figuratively discover how to speak the same language and move on from their past differences.

King is a Thai-Australian playwright with an international career. Her plays have been performed in London, D.C., and multiple Australian cities including Melbourne and Sydney. Golden Shield had its 2019 world premiere in Melbourne, having been commissioned by Melbourne Theatre Company's NEXT STAGE Writers' Program. Now, the show makes its American and Off-Broadway debut, with May Adrales directing Golden Shield in New York.

Get Golden Shield Off-Broadway tickets on TodayTix.

What to Watch For

• Golden Shield takes its name from the Golden Shield Project, the sweeping internet security operation of the Chinese government. This project operates the internet firewall that keeps Chinese internet users from accessing sites the government sees as a threat; it's colloquially called The Great Firewall of China as well as the Golden Shield.
• Besides the name, Golden Shield is also loosely based on a real-life event: a 2016 class-action lawsuit against a U.S. company. Chinese dissenters accused the company of colluding with China's government to increase censorship.
• Golden Shield was a finalist for the 2020 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for playwriting. Among the other finalists are Aleshea Harris's What to Send Up When It Goes Down and Dominique Morisseau's Confederates, both of which also appeared off Broadway in the 2021-2022 season.
• The dialogue in Golden Shield includes Mandarin and English, and a translator is actually a character in the play with a character arc of their own, on hand to translate the different languages (and legal jargon) for the audience.
• The Australian premiere of Golden Shield was a multimedia production, incorporating video projections into the play. Cameras sometimes even filmed the actors as they performed and broadcasted the footage in real time, allowing the audience to see the action from multiple angles.