Beautiful Princess Disorder Brings a Queer, Surreal, and Tender Adventure to Houston

There are plays that feel grounded in reality, and then there are plays that rocket-launch themselves into parts unknown. Beautiful Princess Disorder, the world premiere from playwright Kathy Ng (she/they) at The Catastrophic Theatre, belongs unabashedly to the latter. Billed as “a fuzzy-edged sibling drama for the only child,” the production opens the gates to a surreal afterlife where Triangle Person lives in the parking lot of Heaven with Mother Teresa and Tilikum, the infamous SeaWorld orca. God lives next door, but, hilariously and tellingly, “he has never come to visit.”

The comedy is wild, but it’s not chaos for chaos’s sake. For Ng, the seed of this specific universe began in graduate school with a solo-performance prompt that forced her to explore unfamiliar terrain. “The prompt that semester in school was solo,” she recalls, adding that she began imagining a character she “would never do in real life,” inspired by a childhood doodle of “a triangle-headed person with a swimsuit.” That doodle grew into the play’s central figure, Triangle Person, and the parking lot of Heaven emerged from a real place Ng often walked near her home. “There’s this parking lot that’s above ground, that’s really close to the sky, that I really love walking across,” she elaborates.

“Mother Teresa and Tilikum just slowly emerged as I was exploring the world,” Ng says. The result is a comedic landscape governed by absurdity, shapes, confessions, and a celestial bureaucracy that keeps promising, “The Angels will be here to process you shortly.”

Ng’s writing is rooted in curiosity about form and language. “I love it when I feel like I’ve learned a new language, almost,” she explains. “I’m always trying not to take language for granted when I write.” In this play, she even found herself meditating on how “shapes themselves can be words and evoke memories or the way that our subconscious talks to itself.”

But beneath the surreal exterior is something intimately human. Beautiful Princess Disorder spirals toward a series of confessions. These acts of disclosure echo the queer experience of revealing deeply held truths. “I was playing with the idea of shame, which, of course, is what makes people curl up into a ball,” Ng notes. “It leans into a more autobiographical confession of things that I swore I would never, ever share.” The acts of revelation in the play came from a time when she felt “pretty down on [herself]” and was wondering, “What would happen if I did the scariest thing possible?”

That experiment mirrors the queer experience of naming oneself, especially in a world that would rather avoid complexity. Ng says the process felt “both momentous and also just quotidian.” She connects this duality to coming out because it’s the act of “telling people who you are, who you like, and who you want to be.”

As a queer Asian playwright from Hong Kong working in the American theater, Ng’s perspective infuses the work, even when she pushes against labels. “Working here has really made me want to explore what is other, what’s alien,” she reveals. She’s drawn to “the cracks, crevices, and the gooey-ooey stuff that’s not necessarily out in the open all the time.” Though she acknowledges that there is absolutely an underrepresentation of queer Asian playwrights, she adds that artists like Celine Song and Aya Ogawa “help [her] feel brave as well.”

That bravery manifests in the play’s bold assertion of identity, especially in Triangle Person’s insistence that they are a Beautiful Princess. “I was interested in something that is almost unrecognizable to us, making this demand, making this declaration of themselves,” Ng says. Princesshood, she points out, is a fantasy that “tends to begin at very early stages of life.” 

When she first encountered the phrase “Beautiful Princess Disorder,” it was a meme she came across online in reference to Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Through that she saw a doorway into exploring BPD, mental health stigma, and the human ache to be seen. “I self-diagnosed myself with it,” she explains, adding that she was trying “to find answers for some of the things about [her] own mental health and behaviors [she] wasn’t proud of.” She became interested in “softening those edges and blurring,” hoping the play might offer “an alternate way of understanding” both for those with personality disorders and those who love them.

As heavy as that sounds, comedy remains central. “Laughter is a lifeline just for existing,” Ng says. Some of her favorite moments come when she writes something “so dumb” it makes her crack up. She points to playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’ observation that laughter is like vomiting, “a release, almost,” and adds, “so much of theater I love because it feels like an inside joke sometimes with the audience.”

That spirit is amplified by The Catastrophic Theatre’s adventurous ensemble. Ng describes working with them as “such an adventure,” especially since “it’s [her] first time in Houston, Texas.” She was struck by their decades-long relationships, remarking, “it’s really cool and inspiring to me because I don’t have those relationships yet.” Their collaboration even inspired large-scale design choices. “This version of the play has a whole car in it. A station wagon,” she notes, laughing at the audacity of putting a real car onstage.

At the heart of everything is an invitation. Ng says theater is always “a two-part gesture,” adding, “the audience has to also jump in or accept the invitation.” For queer audiences specifically, she hopes they “feel held and seen,” especially in moments when Triangle Person is called “a little guy, a little gremlin, a little goblin,” and also a princess. “That’s how I feel walking through the world a lot,” she admits.

Ultimately, Ng wants audiences to leave “feeling a little softer on yourself, a little gentler,” and maybe “more okay with the goopy, confusing parts of you.”

In a world that often demands simplicity, Beautiful Princess Disorder makes space for the beautiful mess of being alive. And in that parking lot of Heaven, surrounded by saints, whales, and angels who are always running late, Ng offers us the blessing to stay forever and maybe see yourself differently when you walk back into the sky.

What: Beautiful Princess Disorder
WhenB November 21–December 13, 2025
Where: Midtown Arts and Theater Center Houston (MATCH), 3400 Main Street
Info: tinyurl.com/mr65pzww