Keiko Green’s Amazing, Very Good Year

The last year has been a whirlwind for Keiko Green, a seemingly never-ending, cross-country odyssey of plane flights, workshops, productions, meetings and—when she can fit it in—some actual writing.

But ever since her play, You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World! was featured at the 2024 Pacific Playwrights Festival, one takeaway has followed Green on every one of her trips. And it follows her back to SCR for the world premiere of her comedy running April 5-May 3 on the Segerstrom Stage.

First, let’s return to the 2024 Pacific Playwrights Festival.

“It was just really rewarding that I had so many people coming up to me. There was a line of people wanting to talk and wanting to share something with me,” she said. “There were certain things I expected. But people were saying, ‘Yes, I recently lost someone and this spoke to me.’ People wanted to talk to me about their loved ones and people who were gender-expansive, saying they felt seen in this play. It was truly inclusive in every sense: kids going through figuring out who they are and parents trying their best to navigate that.

“But what I was surprised about was the number of people coming up afterward and telling me they had a terminal diagnosis, or they were a cancer survivor. There were people who had a terminal diagnosis who told me, ‘I was so happy this played showed myself and othesr that life isn’t over yet. Some people want to grieve me when I’m gone and this play was funny and full of life and it’s about savoring the time we have and making it more significant.’”

Since You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World! engaged SCR audiences last spring, Green hasn’t had much time to savor anything—other than the wave of success she’s riding. After PPF, Green workshopped the play in Texas, the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference in Connecticut—one of the most prestigious destinations for playwrights—Boston Court Theatre in Pasadena, the Ashland New Plays Festival in Oregon and finally, back at SCR for a workshop last fall largely focused on production elements.

If 2024 was the year of workshops, 2025 is her year of productions. Already, two of Green’s plays: Exotic Deadly: Or the MSG Story and Empty Ride, were produced at San Francisco Playhouse and The Old Globe, respectively. Then, comes You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World! at SCR, followed by the world premiere of Gorgeous at the Raven and Rivendell Theatres in Chicago. The fall brings Exotic Deadly: Or the MSG Play to Pork Filled Productions in Seattle. Three other productions haven’t been announced yet, meaning that as of now, Green’s year includes eight productions.

There are days Green feels like she’s on the same kind of runaway roller-coaster she puts her characters on. It’s only late March and already, Green has already been out to New York twice: once to workshop You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World! at Second Stage and once for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize ceremony, where her play was one of the finalists. During that trip, she spent three days workshopping a children’s play about Bruce Lee, Be Like Water.

And Green is also writing for the Apple TV show “Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” where she gets to pen dialogue for Elle Fanning, Nicole Kidman, Michelle Pfeiffer, Nick Offerman and Greg Kinnear.

“I’m still recovering from the last couple of months, because they’ve been crazy,” she said. “… I knew these first few months would be a little crazy. ... It’s awesome and also a lot of work, but it’s nice to finally see these things come to life.”

You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World! holds so much meaning to Green because she wrote it during a psychologically searing year for her—2020. Amid the pandemic, Green lost her mother-in-law and father-in-law in a six-month span. She wrote the play as a reaction to the loss, but at first, the production did not materialize.

“Just getting to do the play at all, to get the opportunity to work on it was really exciting and I was stressed out about it,” she said about last year’s PPF readings. “… My only hope coming out of PPF was to reclaim it and breathe life back into it. We had such an incredible time working on the play and because we were in the Nicholas (Studio) in the multiple-reading slot, we never got to relax. But it also meant the play kept growing and growing. We learned things from each read and got to have this play as an event. There was a shared, unique experience to each event.”

A trimming process and rewrites followed, as did more readings and workshops—which eventually involved putting back items that were deleted in post-PPF workshops. Through those, Green gained two key takeaways involving two characters.

The first involved establishing a timeline for M, the emcee of the play, to tell the story in a believable fashion. The second involved Greg, M’s father. How does he reconcile the fantastical elements that drop he experiences after his diagnosis? Green took those moments from fantasy to reality.

“We started asking questions about what are the rules here,” she said. “We worked on what is M’s story throughout as the emcee. Why are they sharing this production with us? Where are they starting the play and where are they ending it timeline-wise? What are the rules you start with? When you write a play, you can do whatever you want to. But it’s not until you realize it’s going to have a production in front of people, that you have to figure out the rules of things I wasn’t worrying about before.”

Now, with her play about to make its world premiere with trusted director in Zi Alikhan and a talented cast Green said she wishes she could share with audiences “the absolute lovefest going on in that (rehearsal) room,” and with several other productions staking out places on her 2025 calendar, Green doesn’t have much time for leisure.

And she’s enjoying the ride.