The youngest members of the millennial generation have been making their mark on the UK and U.S. theatre industries for the better part of a decade now. Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss were undergraduates at Cambridge University when they wrote SIX: The Musical, the 2017 pop musical that’s still running on Broadway and in the West End. In 2021, Rob Madge—a British writer and actor who was 24 at the time—premiered My Son’s A Queer (But What Can You Do?) in London, where it was later nominated for an Olivier Award.

Now, it’s Gen Z’s turn to take big swings as younger writer-performers make their voices heard. Esho Rasho is a prime example. The Chicago-based theatre artist graduated with a BFA in acting from the Theatre School at DePaul University in June 2023, and his solo play, Dummy in Diaspora, is already finding success. After a well-received run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2024, the coming-of-age show makes its U.S. premiere at Chicago’s Jackalope Theatre, onstage through March 23. The production is directed by Karina Patel, a 2022 Northwestern University graduate who is currently the new works manager at Jackalope Theatre and literary associate at Chicago Shakespeare Theater.

Dummy in Diaspora emerged from a difficult period in Rasho’s early career and personal life. Six months after his graduation, he was struggling to get acting roles, had no manager, and his mother was undergoing chemotherapy. So he decided to put his own story into writing. “I sat in my room for three days, and I wrote Dummy in Diaspora with truly no belief that it would get produced, let alone so soon,” Rasho recalls. However, local theaters expressed interest almost immediately, and in June 2024, Rasho performed a weekend of previews at Chicago’s Den Theatre before premiering the play in Edinburgh last August.

Rasho chose to write an autobiographical play largely because he didn’t see his experiences represented in the performing arts and media landscapes in the U.S. As a queer, first-generation Assyrian American whose parents are Middle Eastern Christians and war survivors from Iraq and Lebanon, Rasho feels he holds a “very singular identity.” In the show, he dramatizes his story through a protagonist named Essa, played by himself. “I hope [Dummy in Diaspora] sheds light on an identity people didn’t know existed or haven’t heard from. I don’t think there’s a lot of stories, whether in film, TV, or American theatre, that tell the story of this identity in a fully fleshed, human way.”

A dramedy that evokes the tone of an indie coming-of-age film, the play has plenty of “laugh out loud” moments, based on its reception from audiences thus far, says Rasho. “I’ve had a lot of absurd experiences growing up in the U.S., with my identities and with my parents’ experiences,” he elaborates. The show also delves into tough themes, such as Essa’s coming out as queer to his religious parents, his mother’s cancer, body image issues, fear of aging, and nicotine addiction.

While Essa’s background is quite specific, critics also found many universal elements in his story during the Edinburgh run. Culture Fix asserted that the playwright “conveys Essa’s introspective musings with a relatability ensuring this piece is affecting and absorbing to a diverse audience.” Writing for Broadway Baby,Richard Beck noted, “Rasho is an accomplished storyteller, proud to lay his life bare so that others might identify with his experiences. Told with manifest honesty, the highs and lows are related in a gentle, warm and endearing manner that reaches to the hearts of his listeners.”

For the show’s U.S. premiere, Rasho and Patel agree that Jackalope Theatre, based on Chicago’s far North Side, is the perfect fit. This season, the company returned to its usual venue at Broadway Armory Park, the Chicago Park District’s largest indoor recreational facility, after the city had used the building as a temporary migrant shelter the previous year. “We were looking for shows in our season that just felt really, really true to Jackalope, and really true to the core of what we do, which is tell American stories from new perspectives and really question what it means to be American and what it means to have an American story,” says Patel. “When Esho sent me Dummy in Diaspora, I was like, this is exactly the type of work that we’re interested in doing.”

In the play, Essa genuinely loves America, but it’s not always that simple. “He can be parts of himself in America in a way that, if he was born where his parents were, he wouldn’t be able to. But then there’s another part of himself that feels like he can’t fully express here,” relates Rasho. “It’s this really complicated relationship to America and to his homeland.”

With a creative team made up of 20-somethings, the play brings a youthful perspective to themes that Rasho and Patel feel are both relevant and timeless. Rasho also hopes that it will spark more local interest in solo works by writer-performers, which he notes—referencing the success of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag—are more common in the UK. Will Dummy in Diaspora fit the bill? Chicago audiences will make that call.