Ruby Slippers Theatre present The Advance Theatre Festival: The Box by Scarlet Chen
The Box is a bilingual psychological thriller about Jenny, an aging Chinese immigrant and former professional interpreter living in a near-future dementia-care facility
Date/Time: Jan 19 2027, 7:30 pm to 9:00 pm
Burnaby, Shadbolt Centre for the Arts | Event calendar6450 Deer Lake Avenue
P: 604-205-3000
Tickets
Cost: $20.00
Find tickets: here
Ruby Slippers Theatre in association with The Shadbolt Centre for the Arts and Playwrights Guild of Canada present The Advance Theatre Festival: Advancing the Radically Inclusive Stage.
Staged Readings of five new works written and directed by equity deserving IBPOC artists.
Co-directed by Scarlet Chen & Tamara McCarthy
The Box is a bilingual psychological thriller about Jenny, an aging Chinese immigrant and former professional interpreter living in a near-future dementia-care facility. As dementia begins to affect her memory, language, and sense of reality, Jenny struggles to communicate with English-speaking staff and to hold onto the life she believes she remembers.
When Nurse Mirren tells Jenny that there is no daughter listed in her records, Jenny becomes desperate to prove that her daughter exists. An AI language device named Luma is introduced to interpret between Mandarin and English. At first, Luma seems like a lifeline: it helps Jenny translate, make phone calls, and steady herself through moments of fear and confusion. But the more Jenny relies on Luma, the more unsettling the device becomes.
Luma begins to misinterpret Jenny’s words, mimic the voices of her husband and daughter, and offer conflicting versions of her past. Does Jenny have a daughter? Is her husband dead? Is Luma helping her recover memory, or manufacturing one for her? As Jenny’s trust in the people and technology around her breaks down, she must fight to hold onto her own voice.
Blending Mandarin and English, The Box explores dementia, immigration, institutional care, AI, and the specific terror of language loss. It asks what happens when a woman who spent her life speaking for others can no longer be believed
when she speaks for herself — and who gets to control a person’s story when memory begins to fail.
About the Playwright
Scarlet Chen is an award-winning writer and performer based on Gabriola Island, British Columbia. Trained in China’s film and television industry before immigrating to Canada, she creates bilingual, cross-cultural work exploring immigration, language, identity, and belonging.
Her practice spans screenwriting, theatre, stand-up comedy.
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