6:00 PM // Rehearsal Hall A – Third Floor
By Yilong Liu, The Juilliard School
Directed by Baron Vaughn
Alliance Theatre presents WE BORROWED BROKENNESS, one of four free, staged readings during the 2025 Alliance/Kendeda Week.
Five strangers gather at the tail end of Brooklyn, chasing the dream of running the New York City Marathon. Except that they aren't really strangers, and this isn't really their dream. They are a group of organ transplant recipients determined to honor their donor's dying wish – but each of them is also running a race of their own.
BIOS
Yilong Liu is an internationally produced playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. A recent graduate of The Juilliard School’s Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program, his play The Book of Mountains and Seas received the Lambda Literary Award for Drama and won Second Place in the BBC Popcorn Writing Award at the 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. His play Good Enemy premiered off-Broadway at Minetta Lane Theatre as part of Audible Theater’s 2022–2023 season. Yilong was an artist-in-residence at Sala Beckett in Barcelona with PlayCo in 2024, where his play We Borrowed Brokenness was translated and performed in Catalan.
Born and raised in China, Yilong earned his MFA from the University of Hawai‘i. He is a Core Writer at the Playwrights’ Center and has received fellowships from the Playwrights Realm and the Dramatists Guild Foundation. His work has been developed with Ojai Playwrights Conference, Ensemble Studio Theatre/Youngblood, Kennedy Center, Space on Ryder Farm, and more. His accolades include the Kennedy Center’s Paula Vogel Playwriting Award and the Paul Stephen Lim Playwriting Award. Currently, he's under commission from Manhattan Theatre Club's Sloan Initiative.
Baron Vaughn (he/him) is a force to be reckoned with in the world of entertainment with a career that spans live comedy, acting, writing, and directing. As an actor, he’s best known as “Bud”, sharing the screen with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin on the hit Netflix series, Grace & Frankie. Baron also lends his voice as “Tom Servo” in the recent seasons of cult-hit, Mystery Science Theater 3000.
He co-created and co-hosted the groundbreaking Comedy Central showcase variety series The New Negroes with Baron Vaughn and Open Mike Eagle. The show shined a light on both established and rising Black artists in comedy and music. In 2020, Baron continued to push boundaries with Call & Response, a limited series produced by Blavity and Funny or Die. Together with frequent collaborator Open Mike Eagle, he tackled pressing issues of the day in a series that was both thought-provoking and hilarious. Baron’s deeply personal project, Fatherless, directed by the award-winning Dawn Porter, explores the impact of absent fathers on families and communities while he also endeavored to finally connect with his own absent father.
As a stand-up comedian, Baron has been entertaining audiences for more than 20 years. He has two influential comedy recordings, Raised by Cable and Blaxistential Crisis, both available for streaming on all platforms. Baron’s been showcased on Comedy Central’s The Half Hour and The Meltdown with Jonah and Kumail, as well as on HBO’s 2 Dope Queens, Showtime’s SXSW Comedy, and TBS’ Conan. Baron’s headlining performances at major clubs and colleges throughout the US have led him to perform at renowned festivals including Just for Laughs (Montreal & Vancouver), Life Is Beautiful (Las Vegas), and the New York Comedy Festival. Baron, along with Open Mike Eagle, has also toured the live version of the showcase The New Negroes taking it to numerous festivals, clubs, and theaters across the country.
Baron has punched-up shows produced by IFC and Dreamworks, was selected for the inaugural 2016 Sundance New Voices Lab, and of course, wrote on both The New Negroes and MST3K. Baron’s directorial debut, the short film “So Much To Do” featuring Toni Trucks, can be seen in the horror anthology, Scare Package, on Shudder. He’s currently working on a solo show commissioned by the Geva Theatre Center in Rochester, NY where he's also artist-in-residence.
Baron holds a BFA in Acting from Boston University.
