Story behind the play
“No one can use my stories to hurt me.”
I met L in 2023 when she was 16, through a peer mentorship program for children of incarcerated parents. My supervisor warned me to proceed with extreme caution: L’s situation was complex, her relationship with her father was strained, and she had been through a lot. I braced myself to meet a fragile, sensitive teenager.
But L was so much more than that.
A photo of me, L and my supervisor.
We took it in L’s hometown in 2023
In our weekly calls, L proved to be fiercely independent, witty, resilient, and brave. She cooked all her own meals, worked on part time jobs, loved Beauvoir, helped with stray animal shelters, managed her family’s insurance, and mapped out her career plan—even while navigating panic attacks, financial anxiety, and the heavy marks left by her past.
I wrote this play in 2025, as a present for L’s 18th birthday, but was worried of over exposing her experiences. I asked her if she wanted to hold anything back to protect herself.
L asked me: “Why would I get hurt? No one can use my stories to hurt me.”
Of course, I thought in relief, that’s L for you.
“Let me know when the show comes to my hometown, I’ll go see it,” she said.
I started the production.
This Memory doesn’t Taste like a Birthday Cake
is inspired by L’s life story, but it belongs to many.
It speaks to youth who has experienced parental incarceration, struggled with familial trauma, mental illness, and the complex process of making peace with childhood memory as we come of age. Our team member wove personal memories into the play in the creative process, where we invite the young, angry, resilient, struggling, surviving, and triumphing “us” back to the stage, to tell the stories that they didn’t know how to articulate.
This play is partnered with National Alliance of Mental Illness New York State (NAMI NYS) and
See Us, Support Us (SUSU).
We hope to bring this story to more audience, to share, to connect, to sound, to support.
Meet our Team members!
ANDI CUI
Playwright &Director
Andi is a New York based theater maker that writes, directs, performs and dramaturgs. Her practice centers on solo or small-cast works, utilizing episodic narrative and rabbit hole structures to foreground the usually unnarratable subtlety, dream-like absurdity, and emotional residue of everyday experience.
J Payton
Stage Manager
J is a stage manager, designer, and big fan of getting weird with it. Stage Management is their first love and they’re thrilled to be doing it. J believes in good music, temperate weather, and supporting new works in any way possible. Selected projects include Into the Woods, Hamlet, Heroes of the Fourth Turning, and half a dozen plays by emerging playwrights at Sarah Lawrence College. Outside of this room J creates video art and gets up to hijinks on @bluejaess on instagram
sadie Leopold
Lighting Design
Sadie is a Connecticut/New York based lighting designer and a soon-to-be graduate of Sarah Lawrence College. They are a long-time lover of everything color, mood, and atmosphere. This is their NYC lighting design debut, and they’re so excited to be here!
Ci Song
Projection Design
CI is a New York based visual artist and graphic designer. His work blends art and emerging technologies to explore—and ultimately shape—the future of new media. Check out more about Ci’s work here: galaxci.com
Athena Yin
Cast
Athena is a bilingual actor and theatre-maker. A graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Arts, she is drawn to stories that explore shared, subtle human experiences across cultures and generations, often through metaphor, synesthetic imagery, philosophy, and absurdity.
Jia’er Liu
Dramaturg
Jia’er is an avid reader who prays for Andi and the show from time to time (her cat, too).
Chelsey Meng
Scenic Design
Chelsey Meng is a scenic designer, theatre maker, and performance artist working across experimental theatre, movement, and visual storytelling. She likes playing with bodies, images, and space, and is especially drawn to feminine energy and storytelling through diverse female perspectives.