Photo by Ava Persaud ’25/The Choate News
Exploring her passion for storytelling, Audrey Lim ’23 joined the playwriting Arts Concentration program to expand her writing skillset beyond the short stories, poems, and novels she was already familiar with. As she wrote more plays and read more works, Lim fell in love with playwriting. Since then, Lim has ventured into screenwriting and won several awards for her scripts; she received Gold Keys for the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and became a semi-finalist in the 2022 Eugene O’Neill Theater Center Young Playwrights Festival.
One of Lim’s earliest experiences with playwriting was when she composed and submitted a play for Choate’s Fringe Festival during her sophomore year. “When my first real short play made it into the program, I was so happy,” she said. This year, her play Overboard was also featured in the production.
Lim’s screenwriting journey had a natural beginning. After reading a short screenplay — a piece by Ethan Luk ’20 — for the first time in the spring of her freshman year, she decided to branch out from her comfort zone of playwriting and began to write short films for fun. She credits her strong foundation in playwriting for paving her way into screenwriting. For her, playwriting and screenwriting are “natural ways for [her] to tell stories and paint pictures of characters and really interesting people.”
With her experience in both screenwriting and playwriting, Lim finds that the most significant differences between the two are the constraints that come with screenwriting, where the script must be easy to read for directors and producers. “A lot of the fancy writing and figurative language and focus on diction that goes into playwriting can’t be used in screenwriting because it ends up being a distraction from the goal of production,” she said. Lim also noticed parallels between the two, adding that “you can make pretty much any story come alive either way” and that both “are really great platforms for storytelling.”
One of Lim’s favorite plays she has written is A-Loi-ah, a personal story inspired by her mother and grandmother. The play’s name is derived from the English phonetic spelling of “daughter” in Cantonese. The story follows a girl named Jade who struggles with her Chinese identity and her relationship with her mother. It also revolves around the prevalence of hate crimes targeting Asians in San Francisco. “It’s just bringing awareness to that topic because a lot of the time it’s not widely covered,” said Lim.
Jade’s character is inspired by Lim herself, who is from the Bay Area and is half Korean and half Chinese. “When I was growing up, I really wanted to be what I thought was American. I would watch these Barbie movies and be like, ‘That’s what I have to look like,’” said Lim. “So, I used that part of me … to write the beginning about Jade feeling like she wants to immerse herself in what America is supposed to be,” she said.
Although Lim wrote the entirety of A-Loi-ah in one day, one of her biggest challenges was fitting the play into ten minutes, which was a requirement for the competition she originally wrote it for. Nonetheless, the writing process was particularly memorable and special to Lim because she wrote it while sitting next to her mom, whom she would ask for feedback and suggestions. “When I think about [A-Loi-ah], I think about her,” she said.
Along with her mother, Lim appreciates endless support from her Arts Concentration adviser, Mrs. Kate Doak, along with the arts faculty, her dean, her adviser, and the Choate community. “No one’s ever put down my writing here,” she said. “No one’s ever been like, ‘That’s not important.’” The support and enthusiasm of Lim’s mentors and teachers have been extremely valuable to her. “It feels like they really care, and I think that’s a great environment to grow in because I know I’m not doing everything by myself,” she added.
In the future, Lim hopes to continue screenwriting and playwriting on a professional level. “For now, it’s pretty up in the air, but I’m definitely going to be a writer,” she said. At the moment, Lim is working on a feature-length romance screenplay that she hopes to get produced along with her other stellar works.
