Petunia Hu is a dramaturgical director and playwright based in the United States. Her theatrical work blends the personal with the metaphorical, exploring intersections between seemingly disparate experiences, from classical literature and immigration to natural disaster and family violence. Her most recent piece, Cinderella and Frankenstein’s Monster Are Dead, received rave reviews at the 2025 Brighton Fringe. Beyond the rehearsal room, she is a journalist covering culture, fashion, and lifestyle, with by-lines in V Magazine and Modern Luxury.
What’s your show about and where can we see it?
Cinderella and Frankenstein’s Monster Are Dead follows 昭兰 (Zhao Lan), a Chinese exchange student in the United States who relates deeply to Frankenstein’s monster because she always feels stitched together and out of place. When her high school drama club stages Cinderella, she auditions, hoping it will finally help her fit in. But as she continues to struggle with language and belonging, she begins to wonder if she’s been chasing the wrong story all along. You can catch us at Edinburgh Fringe from August 7th to 29th at theSpaceUK.
Any advice for those taking their first show to Edinburgh?
Learn to delegate tasks! Your team in Edinburgh might be small, but having everyone flyering or setting up together is much better than trying to do everything yourself. If you’re an international artist, ask that friend back home to help with marketing, social media, budgeting, or design plans. Festival month can get incredibly draining, so it’s important to know your limits.
I also think it’s crucial to adapt your staging to the technical and spatial constraints of Fringe venues, whether your show is brand new or has had previous runs. If a performance space can’t support elaborate tech, simplify it and let those restrictions guide you back to the heart of the story.
Where do you get your inspiration from?
I always describe my writing process as walking around with a basket or carrier bag, collecting stories, images, and little fragments from the world around me. My theatre company, The Beachcombers, is built on that same idea. I’m really interested in connecting things that might seem completely unrelated at first and tracing the emotional parallels between them.
With Cinderella and Frankenstein’s Monster Are Dead, for example, I became really interested in the contrast between who society chooses to embrace and who it rejects. I started thinking about the relationship between a girl in a glass slipper who becomes a princess, a creature who is labelled a monster, and my own experience of trying to be accepted as a foreigner and woman of colour in a majority-white society. A lot of my work comes from trying to understand difficult emotions through those kinds of intersections. I think stories that are too neat or linear often don’t feel large enough to hold certain experiences, especially for marginalised communities.
What have you been working on?
I’ve been staging and workshopping a play called Volcano Runners, which explores the parallel between living near a volcano and growing up in an abusive family, asking the question: “Why don’t you leave?” The project came out of my experience climbing Mount Vesuvius. While I was in Naples, I became fascinated by the history of generations of people continuing to build homes near a place many scientists consider dangerous. Eventually, I began to see similarities between that reality and my own experience as a survivor – living day by day in a place I feel deeply attached to, but that also hurts me. This realisation unlocked the play for me.
What do you love about writing and producing?
I love writing because it feels like making something from nothing. At first, it’s a very solitary process, but writing for theatre also means imagining that other people might connect with the same ideas, emotions, or questions you’re exploring. Producing is the process of actually bringing those people together in the same room to share a kind of storytelling ritual. It could be a ritual of grief, radical joy, or anything in between that makes us feel a little less alone.
I also think there’s something powerful about intentionally creating a world and then watching it affect someone else in real time. Theatre is one of the few places where you can actually witness that transformation happen. It’s a blessing.
You can keep up with Petunia Hu on Instagram.
Tickets and more information can be found here!
