It is Right to Rebel! by Andy Boyd tells the story of Jiang Qing, who was Mao Zedong's wife for thirty-eight years. The play is framed around her 1980 trial for attempting to overthrow the Communist Party and make herself Chairman. Using this frame, we see Jiang Qing climb her way from homelessness and poverty to stardom on the Shanghai stage (in a celebrated production of A Doll's House). When the revolution comes, she retreats to Mao's mountain headquarters in Yanan and quickly strikes up a relationship with him. However, the rest of the Communist leadership is suspicious of her: is she just some bourgeois actress? Is she maybe a Kuomintang spy? They agree to let her marry Mao under one condition: she must never be involved in politics, only cultural policy.

After spending the fifties sidelined by Deng Xioaping and Liu Shaoqi (including long involuntary stays in a Moscow mental hospital) Jiang Qing figures out how to seize power: she will use her authority as an expert on theatre to wage a propaganda battle against Deng, Liu, and the rest of the "revisionists." This propaganda battle quickly becomes a literal civil war: The Cultural Revolution. However, when Mao dies without naming her his successor, she quickly falls from power and is put on trial.

This is a play about theatre as politics, politics as theatre, and revenge as revolution.

Stage Reading as part of The Tank’s residency at Powerhouse Theater (Summer 2025)

Playwright - Andy Boyd

Director - Zinc Tong

Jiang Qing — Wai Ching Ho

Mao Zedong — Kenneth Li

Deng Xiaoping— Michael Liu

Actor 1 — Angela Chew

Actor 2 — Claro De Los Reyes

Actor 3 — Elijah Guo

Stage Directions/Stage Manager - Cynthia Hu