Yilong Liu, an award-winning playwright from New York City, brings his poignant and comedic drama, The Book of Mountains and Seas, to the Edinburgh Fringe. This moving play explores themes of loss, love, and cultural identity through the lens of a father and son’s shared journey.
In The Book of Mountains and Seas, a California dad teams up with his late son’s boyfriend to embark on an ambitious quest – visiting all 179 restaurants reviewed on his son’s popular Yelp page in a single weekend. Prepare to be taken on an emotional rollercoaster filled with laughter, tears, and the best Chungking beef noodle soup in New York.
Don’t miss The Book of Mountains and Seas at Pleasance Courtyard (Beneath) from July 31 to August 25, 2024 (excluding August 5, 12, and 19). Book your tickets now.
You’re bringing your play, The Book of Mountains and Seas, to the Edinburgh Fringe this year. What can you tell us about this comedic drama?
The Book of Mountains and Seas follows a grieving father named Raymond who decides to visit every single restaurant his late son Archie reviewed on Yelp, hoping to unlock insights into their complicated relationship. Raymond goes on this quirky journey with the help of Archie’s former boyfriend Andrew, who lives in New York. It’s an energetic, hilarious, even manic undertaking fueled by love and loss. The play uses food reviews and their unlikely friendship as an unconventional lens into exploring grief, family bonds, and the gaps between cultures and generations. The story blends realism and magical realms as the characters confront profound questions about how much we can ever truly know our loved ones.
What inspired you to weave together these various threads?
I moved to the U.S. 12 years ago, and ever since then, I’ve always been on this quest to find good, authentic Chinese food—particularly the fiery Sichuan cuisine I grew up with. It made me realize how much we stay connected to home through food memories and traditions. Our favorite food says so much about us, who we are, where we came from. Food became this bridge allowing me to carry pieces of my past with me as I continued to shape and reshape my life in America. At the same time, technology has played a big part in helping me find my footing in the new country, and I couldn’t help but wonder: what happens to our digital legacies after we’re gone? All the photos, reviews, data trails we leave behind—can people piece together who we truly are from those fragments? What happens when who we were to our parents isn’t who we are in that new country? What if they only get the chance to know who we really are after we are gone?
As a writer who grew up in China and now lives in New York, how does your own cross-cultural experience inform the perspectives and dynamics portrayed in The Book of Mountains and Seas?
One of the core thematic questions driving The Book of Mountains and Seas is: What compels people to cross mountains and seas to another country, culture, and continent? As someone who has lived that journey myself, I occupy a unique position of feeling like both an insider and an outsider to American and Chinese cultures simultaneously, which allows me to relate to and have empathy for the disparate perspectives at play. The father Raymond and the boyfriend Andrew in some ways represent opposing sides of my own lived experience and internal tensions. These characters are both on profound personal searches, not unlike my own journey. And that overarching feeling of being caught between cultures permeates the entire play’s exploration of grief, family bonds, and the dream of bridging those chasms before it’s too late.
Your play has already received significant recognition. What has this journey been like for you as a playwright?
It’s been an incredibly humbling journey to have this very personal, culturally-blended story receive such significant recognition. I initially started writing it because I wanted to connect with my own family at a time when I felt like I couldn’t. It’s been both validating and incredibly motivating as a writer to see this blend of my most personal truths and wildest narrative quirks finding appreciation from so many different walks of life. It has reinforced how universal the core human experiences it explores truly are—love, loss, the primal drive to find deeper meaning and connection before it’s too late. It makes me want to further tap into my own specific background and experiences, exploring them with audacious creative visions, to hopefully keep delivering new stories that illuminate the universals through an authentically individual lens.
The play seems to find both humour and poignancy in its exploration of grief and intergenerational relationships. Can you share your approach to balancing these tones within the storytelling?
People often process loss in personal, quirky, funny ways. And in Chinese culture especially, there can be an indirectness in how emotions are expressed. A lot of the poignantly humorous moments in the play are inspired by my own father. When I was small, he was always busy working. Later when he was finally around more, he would try to talk to me using “hip” slang that he thought was cool but was actually deeply uncool to me. Looking back now, I can see the heartbreaking earnestness beneath that facade—it was just a father trying to relate to his son in the only way he knew how. I think it’s so important to tell stories about loss with an equal balance of heart and humor, because that’s what life is truly like. The humor never undercuts the pain; it coexists with and provides necessary moments of lightness, hope, and perspective in the midst of profound sadness. I found that embracing those ups and downs allowed me to explore the complexities of intergenerational dynamics, cultural heritage, and human bonds with empathy and nuance.
What would you say to anyone who may be considering booking tickets to see The Book of Mountains and Seas at the Edinburgh Fringe?
I’d simply encourage anyone who appreciates daring, thought-provoking stories that traverse both imaginative realms and penetrating emotional truth to join us on this journey. The Book of Mountains and Seas doesn’t conform to strict genre boundaries—it’s a unique hybrid of magical realism, drama, comedy, and deeply felt personal reckonings. If you’re drawn to unconventional theatrical experiences that use the abstract to pose piercing human questions about identity, loss, and our eternal yearning for connection across divides, then this is a heartfelt, one-of-a-kind story you won’t want to miss at the Fringe. It makes you laugh just as much as it makes you feel seen in your own struggles to bridge chasms with loved ones.
