LOVE YOU LONG TIME (ALREADY)
Theatre503
★★★½
“a fine production with tenderness and craft”
A papier-mâché texture softens every object on the Theatre503 stage, dissolving edges as if seen through memory, slightly out of focus. Elsewhere, the set is coming apart: a wall hangs unmoored in mid-air, severed from whatever should hold it up. It’s a fittingly hazy dreamscape for love you long time (already), Katie Đỗ’s play about how trauma travels through mother and daughter.
Directed by Jennifer Tang, the play follows Mai (Tuyen Do), newly arrived in an afterlife unlike the one she pictured, and her daughter Tâm (Molly Harris), reckoning with the shape her mother’s pain left on her life. Long ago, Mai’s husband Long (Jon Chew) betrayed her, and across the play we watch that old wound continue to swallow her: isolation deepening, fear tightening into an anger she never lets go of. That inheritance shadows Tâm too, not least through her friendship with a boy from church, Huy (Zheng Xi Yong): Mai’s distrust of men colours the friendship and stirs tension between mother and daughter. As the initial afterlife scene fades into memory, the two women circle each other across time, trying to find a way through what was passed down as much as left unsaid.
That story mostly unfolds in a naturalistic register, though it’s punctuated by heightened, physical interludes from movement director Dam Van Huynh — one stands out: a surreal, television-inflected sequence in which the actors conjure a ghoulish visage from little more than a veil. This moment captures Mai’s grief and dislocation most vividly, offering a glimpse of a bolder, stranger production.
The performances carry real detail throughout. Harris does a fine job giving Tâm a quieter register than pure anger, her helplessness apparent in the distance she can’t help forcing between them and in the quiet work of undoing what’s passed down. Do, meanwhile, fills Mai with a bitterness that reflects a lifetime spent trying not to be seen, loving sideways through snipes and backhanded compliments, always pushing Tâm towards a steady career or a good marriage. Chew brings real weight to Long without asking for sympathy he hasn’t earned. While Do and Harris might have done more to differentiate the ages their characters pass through; Yong fully embraces that range, lending Huy an energetic, lived-in quality whatever the era his character inhabits.
Beneath those performances sits writing clearly alert to the risk of melodrama: Tâm even remarks that her life feels like a soap opera, and there are moments, not least her own romantic entanglements, where the observation lands. But it doesn’t diminish the story; instead, the melodrama serves as a funhouse mirror, letting generational trauma unfurl in new ways rather than repeat.
That funhouse-mirror effect carries through the design, too. TK Hay’s set and costume design sustains the dreamlike quality, while Cheng Keng’s lighting is just as considered, shaping the stage with a sudden, sharp flash of blue, or a stop-start, stuttering quality in transitions that keeps shifts between memory and present feeling alive. Elena Peña’s sound design cleverly separates memory from afterlife, and Mai’s love of music runs as a gentle thread across the piece, though there’s more yarn left to pull; a production this attuned to memory could have let music carry more weight.
By its close, love you long time (already) tries to leave Mai with something akin to peace, a small slice of heaven after a lifetime of deep complication. Though I’m not fully convinced the production’s ending quite earns its wings, judging by the mother and daughter quietly sniffling in the row ahead of me, perhaps it lands exactly where it needs to. Ultimately, this is a fine production with tenderness and craft, and if the story of what mothers pass down to daughters hasn’t found a clean ending on paper, it clearly finds its mark in the room.
LOVE YOU LONG TIME (ALREADY)
Theatre503
Reviewed on 7th July 2026
by Daniel Outis
Photography by Ikin Yum
