67th Obie Awards: Shannon Tyo Acceptance Speech

You cannot stop watching her: whether in Lloyd Suh’s poignant Chinese immigrant drama THE FAR COUNTRY, where she plays a bride-to-be and is described as “always dynamic”; when she plays Mora, an Asian American adoptee in Julia Izumi’s hilarious surreal play REGRETFULLY, SO THE BIRDS ARE, where she’s described as “the ever brilliant”; or when she portrays Kristina, an anesthesiologist with challenges in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins haunting drama THE COMEUPPANCE (a reviewer notes that “she turns her wails of regret into a gorgeous aria”). With an agility in performance that left us all speechless and wanting more, the judges have awarded an Obie for Sustained Achievement in Performance to SHANNON TYO.