Bonnes Bonnes, by Tamara Nguyen and Sophie Gee, begins in a space of making. We are gathered around three women preparing chili sauce on stage. A television shows Chinese broadcasts, while behind them is a pristine arrangement of white costumes and domestic objects, which are the seeds of another world waiting to be activated during the show. From this intimate and sensory beginning, the production expands into a layered exploration of anti-Asian racism and Asian cultural identity.
At the centre of the piece is a film created by the character Sophie (played by Gee herself), which is interspersed throughout the show. The film is a video adaptation of the famous Jean Genet play The Maids, featuring two Asian women in the roles of maid and Madame, who speak in French with English subtitles. Solange the maid (Charo Foo Tai Wei) appears submissive, while Claire (Meilie Ng) inhabits a version of Madame that is authoritative, yet unstable. However, as the narrative unfolds, it starts to become clear that this Madame is not real, but has instead been constructed through references to blonde hair, blue eyes, and Western ideals of beauty.
Around this stop-start filmic world, live performers Wai Yin (Wai Yin Kwok), Sophie (Gee) and Meilie (Ng) interrupt, question, and critique what we see. Their responses reveal a range of diasporic identities. Wai Yin was raised in Hong Kong and feels deeply connected to Chinese culture, while Sophie navigates between eastern and western worlds. Finally, Meilie was born and raised in Canada, and is labeled “not Chinese enough” because she is unable to speak Mandarin or Cantonese. Although they seem different, they share two key things in common: their Asian heritage and trauma tied to it. In all three cases, racism, stereotypes, and Western standards have caused them to internalize a sense of self-hatred toward their race, appearance, family, and accent. They express such sentiments explicitly, making comments like, “We hate ourselves, even in Asia.” and “I wanted to be cool, not Asian!”
Most striking is Milie, who emerges as one of the most dynamic presences on stage. Ng moves smoothly between humour, energy, and vulnerability, with a believability that makes her performance feel deeply alive. She represents a generation of Canadian-Asian diasporic individuals who, while still shaped by racism, do not carry the same intensity of anger as earlier generations. Instead of centering hate and fury, Milie highlights the positive elements of her culture, even as she questions her own legitimacy within it.
Gee’s performance as Sophie is also powerful, though paradoxical. Straddling the space between creator and actor, she carries the emotional weight of the piece with a restraint that gradually allows her contradictions to emerge. Her struggle between shame and pride, and distance and belonging, emerges from circumstance and environment. Even as the others challenge her perspective, her emotional logic remains relatable and understandable. She is a portrait of the migrant experience marked by complexity, negotiation, and self-questioning.
Finally, Kwok’s Wai Yin initially seems more rooted and resistant, as she holds onto a more strongly defined sense of cultural identity. But as the performance unfolds, this certainty shifts. While her arc is more subtle, it demonstrates how even strongly rooted identities are not completely fixed. Kwok delivers her performance with controlled restraint and careful pacing, helping to anchor the interactions among the characters.
Lighting plays a key role in shaping the emotional landscape of the three characters. Lighting Designer Nine Desbaille shifts among warm orange, harsh red, and cool blue tones to mark shifts from intimacy to conflict to abstraction. These transitions are especially impressive during choreographed sequences, where the performers move in synchronized, mechanical patterns to an industrial soundscape designed by Christine ML Lee. At these moments, the effect is striking: the performers’ bodies become rhythmic, repetitive machines which evoke stereotypes of Asian labour and productivity, while simultaneously displaying their dehumanizing logic. These tensions surface sharply when the film veers into more aggressive rejection of Western dominance. As the characters on screen destroy Madame’s belongings and begin to replace American symbols with Chinese ones, the performers push back: “We want to stop white hate… I don’t want to be the next white.”
Ultimately, the refusal to settle into a single ideological position becomes the production’s driving force. The show continually asks whether reclaiming power risks reproducing the same structures it seeks to dismantle—and one of the biggest strengths of Bonnes Bonnes lies in the creative answers it stages in its final fifteen minutes. I don’t want to spoil them, so I’ll just note how Solange, the on-screen maid, draws the audience into the film’s emotional intensity, which moves the on-stage characters to rewrite the film’s ending creatively. Then, in instructive and inspiring terms, Sophie the filmmaker reclaims her cultural identity… on her own terms.
In the end, Bonnes Bonnes carries these tensions beyond Sophie, right into the audience. Instead of offering a neat resolution, Bonnes Bonnes challenges us to reconsider our own simplistic, stereotypical ideas about migration and cultural identity, and to recognize the diversity and complexity that characterize individual experiences.
Bonnes Bonnes runs in English at Factory Theatre through April 19, 2026, then continues in French, with English subtitles visible with AR glasses technology, until April 26, 2026. Tickets are available at factorytheatre.ca.
© Paria Azarmehan, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
