I spent decades of my life in New York City, and decades before that in its suburbs. Those are places where takeout food is central to how people eat. It’s more than that: takeout is a keystone of the culture, a mainstay of how people live. In my bachelor years my refrigerator was basically a receptacle for half-full takeout containers. Every kind of cuisine was there. And I remember, especially from my childhood in the ’70s and college years in the ’80s, that a big part of the takeout experience was an important caveat attached to each order: “Hold the MSG!”

Like so many people in those years, I was convinced that MSG was some kind of malign and toxic force. Headaches, high blood pressure, and goodness knows what other ailments would follow from ingesting it. Determined to avoid it, diners got used to vetting takeout joints by how prominently they displayed their handwritten “No MSG” signs in their windows. But now, thanks to tonight’s funny, smart, and subversive new play, I know how wrong we all were. Throughout my life I’ve loved the theatre for a lot of reasons; what a joy to know that even my taste buds are now in this art form’s debt!

Keiko Green’s Exotic Deadly: Or the MSG Play, which makes its world premiere here, is one of the most original creations I’ve had the pleasure to program in my 10 years as artistic leader of the Globe. Formally daring and frequently outrageous, it does a lot of extraordinary things. It gives us a wild ride in the theatre featuring quicksilver dialogue, brilliant and bold strokes of characterization, and the constant deployment of surprise. It looks at questions of family and legacy and how our personal histories simultaneously weigh upon us and set us free. It uses whimsy and fantasy to whirl audiences across time and space until it induces a theatrical version of the vertiginous delight we experience at the amusement park.

And then, and most strikingly of all, as it tells the frankly bonkers story of how MSG got its bad rap all those decades ago, the play locates an undercurrent of something formidable, serious, and dark. Those “No MSG” signs were hung mostly in Chinese and other Asian restaurants, and their presence indicated a real strain of anti-Asian bigotry that, Keiko tells us, is the disturbing subtext to the sentimental narrative of how immigrant groups assimilate into American life. The play’s ability to conjure that kind of sober social analysis through its raucous comic energy is to me nothing short of a miracle. This is playwriting as high-wire act: expert, bold, and audacious. To pull it off, Keiko mines her own biography, finding specific details that open outward toward the universal, and just as her dramaturgy is fearless, so her emotional exploration is unsparing. Ami, the heroine of the play and Keiko’s alter ego, functions as a kind of guide for the audience, and each step she takes—through history, culture, flavor, and even high school romance—reverberates simultaneously with both laughter and seriousness. Keiko makes us howl with delight and gasp with shock. I don’t know another play quite like this one, and it’s a joy to have it at the Globe.

It’s also a joy to welcome director Jesca Prudencio to the Globe for her debut here. A leading artist with deep ties to San Diego (Keiko has those too), Jesca has just the right touch for this complex and rich play. Her imagination is keenly tuned to every stylistic twist and tonal shift, and she’s recruited a team of designers who are every bit as sensitive and gifted. The cast too is a marvel, mixing comic daredevilry and nuanced emotionalism in just the right measure.

We read Exotic Deadly at our Powers New Voices Festival in 2021, and I’m so proud to see our new-play development infrastructure yielding yet another gem for our season. This play embodies so many of the values that drive the Globe, even as it delivers a truly memorable evening of entertainment. Hold the MSG? No, no: bring it on.

Thanks for coming. Enjoy the show.