King of the Yees

King of the Yees is a comedy by Lauren Yee about a playwright, her father and the Chinese American family association he has served for most of her life. It is semi-autobiographical: the character of Lauren is based on Yee herself, and Larry Yee, the father, is based on her real father. The play is aware that it is a play. Actors step out of their scenes, the story stops to address the audience, and the line between what happened and what was invented is part of the fun.

This is the New York premiere, produced by Signature Theatre as a limited engagement at the Pershing Square Signature Center. It is the second production of Signature's 2026–27 season and Yee's third at the company, after Cambodian Rock Band and Mother Russia. Yee is one of Signature's resident playwrights.

As of October 2026, Francis Jue plays Larry and Kelly Marie Tran plays Lauren, in her Off-Broadway debut. Jon Norman Schneider, Maureen Sebastian and David Shih play Actors #3, #2 and #1, each taking on a range of roles over the two acts. Jue, a San Francisco native, returns to a part he has played in other cities, and he won a 2025 Tony Award for Yellow Face. Tran is known for Star Wars: The Last Jedi and for voicing Raya in Raya and the Last Dragon.

The play begins with actors performing a scene about Larry and Lauren, until the character of Larry himself interrupts. He came to see his daughter's new play and is startled to learn that it is mostly about him. Part of the first act plays with the house lights on, as a mock audience question-and-answer session.

Lauren lives in New York and writes plays; she sees her father's association as a leftover from a vanishing world. Larry has been its driving force for nearly twenty years. He counts his family line back 36 generations and likes to remind her that she never learned Chinese. Lauren, for her part, has taken a new last name, married a Jewish man, and may move to Germany. Father and daughter clash over almost all of it.

Near the end of the first act, a scandal around the campaign of state senator Leland Yee, who is no relation, throws Larry, a longtime volunteer on it, into a tailspin, and he disappears. In the second act Lauren goes looking for him. Elders of the community send her around Chinatown to collect strong whiskey, sweet oranges and loud firecrackers, which she needs to open the red-and-gold doors of the association on Waverly Place. The search turns surreal and leads into the lore of the Yee family, and Lauren has to lean on the heritage she pushed away.

The play mixes memoir with invention and says so out loud: early on, the playwright character admits that some of what follows is true and some of it is not quite. Yee has said she always felt her father deserved a play, and she calls this one a love letter to her family, to San Francisco and to its Chinatown. It is an original script, not an adaptation.

Its subjects are racial identity, assimilation in immigrant families and a changing Chinatown, plus the question of what it means to be a Yee. The tone stays comic. Side scenes have the actors trade jokes about Asian casting, such as Korean actors hired to play Chinese roles. A small cast plays many people: in the 2017 productions the three actors also took on the gangster Shrimp Boy, a Sichuan face changer, lion dancers and Leland Yee.

The play runs in the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre, which has 191 seats. The house is modeled on a European opera house, with a proscenium stage and a balcony framed in crafted plywood panels. Frank Gehry designed the building.

Past stagings leaned on theatrical tricks. The 2017 productions included scenes in slow motion and fast-forward, dancing, and a dragon-dance lesson set to a mashup of pop songs. Signature's version has its own design team, so it may solve these moments differently.

Goodman Theatre in Chicago commissioned the play. In 2013 the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation gave a grant to Yee and Goodman for it, and in 2014 it had a workshop in Baltimore Center Stage's Play Lab series.

The play was shown at Goodman's New Stages Festival from November 1 to 15, 2015, directed by Brody with Melissa Canciller as Lauren. The world premiere followed at Goodman's Owen Theatre, running from March 31 to April 30, 2017. Center Theatre Group's production, in association with Goodman, opened on July 16, 2017, at the Kirk Douglas Theatre outside Los Angeles. The real Lauren and Larry Yee attended opening night. One actor played Larry at the festival and in both 2017 productions, alongside Stephenie Soohyun Park as Lauren.

Baltimore Center Stage staged the play in fall 2018 with Desdemona Chiang directing. In 2019 San Francisco Playhouse presented it in the playwright's hometown, again under Brody and again with that same Larry. Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia, a regional company unrelated to the New York Signature, produced it at its ARK Theatre in fall 2023, directed by Jennifer Chang.

Signature announced the New York production on April 15, 2026, as part of its 2026–27 season. The cast and design team were announced on August 13, 2026. Previews began on October 6, 2026, and the official opening is set for October 19, 2026.

The play collected honors during its development. It was on the 2015 Kilroys List and won the 2016 Ashland New Plays Festival Women's Invitational.