The play opens on a dark stage as the folk music of the Dong people, an ethnic minority in China, plays in the background. The lights come up to reveal the actors, who remain seated on the stage when not performing their parts. Two actors portray DHH and Marcus throughout the play, but the other five actors perform a combination of roles. Each of these actors plays roughly 15 to 20 different characters, and the role of The Announcer introduces each new character. 

DHH narrates that in 2006, he, David Henry Hwang, received an email from Marcus G. Dahlman. The actor playing Marcus recites the message’s content, which describes his trip to discover the “soul of China” after the fallout of a scandal in the United States. He tells DHH that the songs of the Dong people are meant to be sung together by all the villagers. The music stops, and DHH explains that Asian Americans still wonder what happened to Marcus, the white actor he had mistakenly cast for an Asian American role in his play over a decade ago. He states that mainstream media rarely notice an Asian American celebrity, but the scandal around Marcus even got the attention of Senator John Kerry.