trip report 001, south coast repertory

Trip Date: Feb 1st, 2025

Wish You Were Here at the South Coast Repertory

As a biology major who likes the arts, I often check the drama callboard in the arts part of school and scrounge the website that posts free student tickets. I got lucky a few weeks ago and scored tickets to a play at the South Coast Repertory named “Wish You Were Here” written by Sanaz Toossi and directed by Mina Morita.

After picking up my ticket at the box office, I had it scanned and headed inside the building. The ushers looked at my ticket and told me I had a balcony ticket, so I climbed a flight of stairs to my seat. The seats were not bad, though the person sitting in front of me was tall enough to block a good portion of the stage from my perspective.

The show is about a couple of Iranian women and their friendship over time through wartime. The story of the play spans over a decade - people gather, leave, and come back together again over the course of the play.

I find that though the setting and characters are distinctly Iranian, the play touches on themes of friendship over time and distance, which are rather universal topics that could apply to anyone. In this way, even someone with almost no background in the culture could understand most of the story, though I’m sure that the play would hit closer to home for someone of Iranian culture.

I have a bit of a background in crew and tech (ran the soundboard for a musical and a few plays during highschool) so I tend to focus on the set design, lighting, and sound. The set design really stood out here - the living room stays rather static throughout the play, but the plants hung from the ceiling “grow” by lowering them ever so slightly between scenes, indicating the passage of time. There is a window at the back of the stage with a bit of a frosted effect where the actors continue to tell the story even during scene changes - a hug, a few mannequins with abandoned dresses.

I also apparently saw the show on a day where they had sign language interpreters translating the dialogue. There were two interpreters, I imagine to allow for conversations between the characters onstage, as one interpreter probably wouldn’t be able to show back-and-forth discussion.

Orange County Museum of Art

After the show, I walked over to the nearby OCMA or Orange County Museum of Art. I had reserved tickets the day before, but they had a QR code where you could get the tickets right then and there, so I guess it wasn’t necessary to reserve ahead of time.

I grabbed a family guide pamphlet while checking in even if I was solo purely because I liked the doodles on the front cover. It's got a childlike quality to it, I think, and its quite charming.

The museum is a bit small, at least compared to past museums I’ve been to, but the space is well suited for the art. Most, if not all, of the pieces are contemporary, and the seemingly physics defying architecture with the concrete flooring added to the atmosphere.

My favorite piece is “A Blue-and-Green Landscape in Rain” by Su Yu-Xin. Don’t let the image fool you, the painting is massive - and its fitting, given the subject matter is literally large scale natural phenomena. The image is presented in a modest and humble manner, with no gold frame, but a simple gently curved edge. The sky and left and right sides are a desaturated green and purple-pink surrounding dark green and blue rolling curved shapes. However, within the land, there are some tangents and hard corners - nature, after all, is not all curved and gentle.

I love the peace that the rain brings, and this massive painting captured both the gloomy desaturated sky and the sense of energy in the air when it rains. Many of the other pieces in her solo exhibition gave me a feeling of slight anxiety - I specifically remember an angry red-orange piece depicting a mushroom cloud, I assume in the aftermath of an atomic bomb, that I couldn't stare at for too long before looking away - but this piece was a nice reprieve in the midst of all the stress, both in and out of the museum.

I also like the strong shapes in this image. I’ve been trying to be more intentional with shape in my own work, and many of the pieces in the exhibition, including this one, have this geometric quality that I find especially beautiful. The contrast between the curves and straight lines give the piece structure, and I can only hope to achieve this level of mastery in terms of shape language.

If you’re in the area, I recommend making the trip to OCMA, even if only for Su Yu-Xin’s work. Her solo exhibition, Searching the Sky for Gold runs from January 31st, 2025 to May 25th, 2025.

South Coast Plaza and Mian

It was getting late once I stepped out of the museum, so I headed across a bridge to the South Coast Plaza for food. I knew it was a fancy place before stepping in, but it surpassed even my imagination of what a fancy shopping outlet looked like. Lots of storefronts consisted of expensive watches in glass display cases and a tall man in a suit, looking to sell accessories that would probably cost me an arm and a leg.

When I finally found Mian, the noodle shop I wanted to eat at, there was a line that wrapped halfway around the corner. It was a Saturday night and the place apparently has a Michelin star, so I wasn’t too surprised.

I ordered a bowl of beef noodle soup - my usual order - and honestly, it was a pretty average bowl of beef noodle soup. I assume I should have ordered something spicy or special to understand why they got a Michelin star because the place apparently specializes in Sichuan region Chinese cuisine, a region known for Sichuan peppercorns and especially spicy food. Problem is, I can’t really handle spice. Maybe I’ll return someday in the future and order something spicy and suffer for my decisions.