Keiko Green Throws Out the Playwriting Rulebook

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This story originally appeared in the winter 2025 issue of UC San Diego Magazine as “Making a Scene.”

Playwright Keiko Green is a rulebreaker — but she wasn’t always so. Her penchant for pushing boundaries was spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic, which closed schools, businesses and the nation’s theatres just months after she joined UC San Diego’s Master of Fine Arts playwriting program in 2019. It was the plot twist no one saw coming.

“When the pandemic hit, it felt like our theatre industry was done,” explains Green.

With ample time to compose, she wrote feverishly, freed from the traditional expectations of a theatre industry whose very existence was threatened. “I started breaking all the rules, writing larger casts that changed locations or adding big dance sequences. I stopped writing what I thought people wanted and just wrote what I would want to see.”

During her three-year graduate program, she authored an astounding nine plays. Each distinct, she taps into meaningful topics while anchoring her characters in surreal storylines.

In “You Are Cordially Invited to the End of the World!,” Green contemplates what it means to live a meaningful life. The story centers on Greg, who feels compelled to combat climate change after receiving a terminal disease diagnosis. Described by Green as an “epic, darkly comedic spectacle,” the play deftly melds personal grief and environmental concerns with bizarre moments such as extinct animals attending a support group and a green army man that springs to life.

But her success as a playwright was propelled by another piece, a fantastical comedy called “Exotic Deadly: Or the MSG Play,” which premiered in April 2023 at The Old Globe in San Diego. It received national attention, as well as the San Diego Critics Circle Best New Play Award. The coming-of-age story centers on Ami, a 14-year-old Japanese American girl who discovers that her family is involved in manufacturing the flavor enhancer monosodium glutamate, commonly known as MSG. With a dash of whimsy, the play centers on Ami, who befriends a mysterious new girl from Japan named “Exotic Deadly” who leads her on a time-traveling trip to save the world from MSG.

There are echoes of Green’s own life in Ami’s journey, minus the time travel. Green’s maternal grandfather was a food scientist at Ajinomoto, a major manufacturer of MSG in Japan, and an unspoken shame associated with the controversial seasoning lingered in her suburban Georgia household.

“Sometimes there is a fear that writing about a specific culture will close you off from audiences,” she says. “But what I’ve found is that the more specific you are about your world, the more the story becomes universal. As a writer and artist, I feel I have a responsibility to show that we are more alike than we are different.”

For Green, an extroverted person who loves to laugh, the solitary nature of playwriting can often feel maddening. In 2024, she joined the writer’s room of the Hulu comedy-drama series “Interior Chinatown,” where she was surrounded by writers at the top of their games.

“I was initially bringing surface-level ideas about how we talk about race, but I realized we were past telling the most obvious versions of these stories,” says Green.

As an MFA student in the Department of Theatre and Dance, part of the UC San Diego School of Arts and Humanities, she learned the importance of posing great philosophical questions in her stories. Green fully embraced this ethos, eagerly wrestling with weighty topics like grief, forgiveness, race, climate change and the intricacies of identity.

“In my writing, I focus on the ugly, messy complexity of being a human being,” says Green, who also balances her plays with humor, a throughline in many of her works. “I think the unforgivable sin in theatre is to bore.”

And it was this tendency to dig deeper into character motivations that set her apart from other writers. “Everyone on ‘Interior Chinatown’ had a sweet little nickname, and mine is ‘Keiko Compass’ because I started to voice the moral compass of the characters,” says Green. “I’m the one to ask, ‘But what does it mean for our character to do that?’ I think this is a superpower that playwrights have, to think about the bigger questions.”

The show goes on

Of the nine plays Green wrote as a graduate student, eight have been produced by theatres across the country, including “Wad.” Originally slated for UC San Diego’s 2020 Wagner New Play Festival, which showcases the novel work of MFA students, “Wad” was canceled along with the festival due to the pandemic. Now, five years later, the play, which centers on a crime-obsessed high school student who becomes pen pals with a man on death row, has premiered at American Lives Theatre in Indianapolis. It was directed by Emily Moler, a fellow member of UC San Diego’s 2019 MFA cohort.

Green’s eventful career will continue next year with the presentation of “Young Dragon,” a children’s play about Bruce Lee that will debut at Seattle Children’s Theatre and later transfer to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Aimed at children ages 8 and up, the story highlights Lee’s journey of self-discovery and the way he fused martial arts with philosophy.

“I used to think that if I was a ‘real’ playwright, I would have one voice, where you’d look at a play and be like, ‘That’s a Keiko Green play,’” she says. “But I’m coming out with this collection of plays that feel different from each other. And I think that’s my true strength.”

Green’s body of work continues to set her apart from contemporaries, captivating audiences with heartfelt authenticity and just a dash of disarming humor.