As America rapidly and violently pursues further xenophobic policies and restrictions on immigration, international students have been left in a state of uncertainty. Every week, a new headline emerges threatening the already precarious situation of international students, and while Swarthmore has announced its commitment to protect its students, anxiety is still pitched incredibly high.
Such an environment creates a chilling effect that makes it difficult for organizations like I20, Swarthmore’s international student organization, to mobilize politically, for such advocacy could jeopardize a student’s place in the country. It is in the context of these fears that Joanna Hong ’28 undertook to devise a new theater piece exploring the multifaceted experiences of international students. The piece was never meant to serve purely as a political manifesto, but rather to situate the political situation as a central and inextricable aspect of the lives the piece portrays.
Hong first conceived the project in 2024 in the hopes of communicating to a broader audience the importance and thematic richness of the international student experience. In 2025, alongside the violent rhetoric of ICE and Trump’s rapid ramping up of xenophobic policy, the piece took on a more urgent political edge.
Rehearsals began in Fall 2025, and much of the devising developed through conversation. Hong sat down with each cast member to discuss their home country, what being an international student means to them, and the unique skills they wanted to bring to the production. With the help of outside partners Makoto Hirano (Philadelphia-based choreographer) and Tyler Dobrowsky (Co-Artistic Director of Philadelphia Theatre Company), Hong and her cast sought to embody the personal and political vastness of being an international student through personal narrative and play.
Interspersed throughout the piece were a number of “games” involving the whole cast. These were where Hong’s unique training and influence as director were most keenly felt. These games furthered the work of the production by moving away from the sense of literalness present in the individual sections, and existing in a more affective register.
Games such as “musical chairs” and “proximity” invoked typical devising techniques such as Anne Bogart’s Viewpoints in using the terms of movement to develop thematic parallels. The musical chairs section was especially evocative, wherein the harsh lighting, sound, and performers’ frantic scramble for seats were juxtaposed with recorded news reports on increasingly stringent American policies toward international students. These games provided a space for audiences to consider the political and humanistic questions of the piece in a register that was less explicit and required more interrogation.
Despite the individual sections being more literal, much of the joy of the piece lay in the portrayal of intimate moments from the performers’ own lives. While the sections differed in theme and structure, each performance involved unearthing something deeply personal and the courage to share that with the audience.
In this case, I mean “sharing” in its most literal sense: in Chanduli Rubasinghe’s ’29 section, she prepared kiribath, a Sri Lankan rice dish, for the audience to eat; in Naw Hser Nay “Rosalind” Paw’s ’27 section, she sang a Burmese song and invited everyone to sing along. Language provides another lens for sharing. Ultimately, all non-English material was translated, but cast members handled translation differently. Most gave direct, immediate translation; Rubasinghe opted for summary translation of her mother’s recorded recipe, while Mina Bakhshi ’27 opted instead for delayed translation of a Farsi poem to prioritize sharing the emotion of the piece through the sound of the language.
One audience member pointed out in the post-show talkback the unique quality of “What’s the Time Back Home” compared to other theater pieces in that the actors were not necessarily “acting.” That is, they were performing as versions of themselves rather than as other people. Intimately personal moments contain a universality which allows audiences to connect much more readily than fully fictional work manages. Accordingly, after a litany of such moments, there was a deep sense of communion between the audience and the performers.
Perhaps the greatest success of the piece was its creation of a veritable community. Theater at Swarthmore often struggles to gain audiences beyond members of the theater department and actors’ friends, so when the sardine-like packing of people swarmed into the Martin design studio, it proved a radical departure from business-as-usual. Despite its size and diversity, the audience unified into one collective through investment in the work of sharing. The unique assemblage of Americans and non-Americans, theatrical and non-theatrical humans never felt awkward and imposed; audience investment in the personal world of the cast was thorough. This success, however, demanded an unanswered (and perhaps unanswerable) question.
A regret central to theater but very keenly felt in response to “What’s the Time Back Home” is that the work of theater is ephemeral. While the heartfelt performances created an empathetic and politically aware community, that community dissolved as soon as audiences left the theater and returned to their individual, atomized lives. Upon exiting that community, there appears a nagging feeling of impotence — the question bubbles up: did we do anything?
There is no easy way to metabolize that question. To attempt to place the onus for that feeling of toothlessness on the devisers is spurious, because where else should they point you? There are no major organizations that focus on the specific plight of international students, and routing advocacy through immigrants rights organizations risks overlooking the policies that uniquely endanger them. Rather than treating this impotence as a critique against the piece, it is imperative that we sit in that discomfort and allow it to motivate us to more sustained action. Alongside the devisers of this piece, we must theorize new modes of advocacy and resistance outside of traditional forms.
The show greeted us by asking about the time back home. It leaves us asking what we will do here and now.
