ArtsEmerson will bring Kristina Wong, #FoodBankInfluencer, to the Emerson Paramount Center from September 19–21, 2025. Written and performed by Pulitzer Prize finalist Kristina Wong and directed by Jessica Hanna, this “uproarious and heartfelt solo karaoke musical” promises to celebrate America’s emergency food system with “biting wit and unstoppable charm”. Theater Mirror’s Mike Hoban had a chance to speak with her last week, before the launch of the tour.
Theater Mirror: You describe this piece as being about “falling in love with the emergency food system” and that it follows the same trajectory as a musical love story. Can you explain?
Kristina Wong: I knew I was going to write a show about food banks inspired by my local food bank in LA, and what I came across was a lot of very heady, boring information. It was interesting, just not interesting to recite into a comedy theater show– so I began to rewrite popular songs, combing through these facts and statistics…
Theater Mirror: In the vein of Weird Al or Randy Rainbow?
Kristina Wong: Yeah. Like rewriting “Hit Me Baby One More Time” as “Expiration Dates Are Lies”. I had put together about five songs and said to myself, ‘This is looking like a musical.’ I was trying to find the story justification for me as a karaoke queen, although I’m not a professional singer, to be singing all these songs about food justice. Then I remembered that in 2022, I had an interview to be the book writer for the Crazy Rich Asians musical set to go to Broadway. I come from such a scrappy background, I felt like a fish out of water interviewing for it. Sure, I did do musicals in high school – but if I had gotten this Broadway writing job, could I really imagine myself non-ironically writing about rich crazy Asians in love? I’m just such a cynic and not exactly a ’Yay, let me earnestly write about rich people!’ kind of artist. I didn’t know if I could do this without completely winking my face off at the audience. Ultimately, I didn’t get the job. But the first scene of the show is me re-enacting my interview for that Crazy Rich Asians job and insisting that I can do it, then not getting the job and realizing my destiny is to write the exact opposite musical. So this is my love story about how I stumbled into a food bank, then just became so obsessively in love with the food bank that I couldn’t stop talking about it, and wanted to make this show about it.
Theater Mirror: But the themes of the show run a lot deeper than a lighthearted musical, correct?
Kristina Wong: Yes. Food banks are amazing resources and, sadly, a Band-Aid for systemic poverty. We weren’t actually a culture that had a lot of hunger before Reagan. Hunger was basically at 3% and then all of these cuts to federal funding happened, and suddenly, there was this growth of food banks in the 80s. Hmmm… where have we seen drastic Federal spending cuts before… or now?
There’s a lot of interesting politics and economics with food banks. The same businesses like Walmart that support food banks also make a lot of money by cashing in on SNAP benefits, while their employees end up relying on this emergency food that they provide indirectly to food bank charities, when it seems like the easier answer would be for them to just pay their workers.
This is the fraught love story we’re in. I fall in love with this food bank, and then slowly discover that this is a really bad fling, that it’s deeper than just throwing food at hunger. And I’m not saying we need to close food banks tomorrow. I also think there is a “theater” of food banks. The ‘Be a Good Human’ default is ‘Volunteer at a food bank’ or ‘Give food to your local food bank,’ but we don’t seem to get beyond that facade. We don’t seem to get to the part where we fight for living wages or affordable housing. And that’s because that fight is hard. It’s a lot harder than collecting old cans from the back of your pantry and throwing them into a giveaway box. So the larger interrogation of the show is, well, how do we get beyond just the Do-Good gesture of a food bank?
Theater Mirror: I know you have been working on this piece for years, so how has it changed in light of the cuts to SNAP and other funding?
Kristina Wong: At this point in our ever-collapsing social safety net, I’m asking, ‘Can’t we just go back to where we were last year?’ (Laughs). The world keeps shifting in the context around emergency food, and we’re going to have a lot more people needing SNAP than ever before. But sadly, those benefits might not even be available with these cuts. Food banks are the backup plan if you run out of food stamps, and they’re not equipped to take on all the people that the government doesn’t feed. There’s a lot to pull apart from all of this, and I’m very proud of how much I can kind of lay out in about 85 minutes.”
Theater Mirror: There’s a lot of very weighty material in this piece, but it’s also very funny. How have you been able to bring your activism into your work and still make it accessible for a broader audience?
Kristina Wong: I take cues from how other political comedians do it. Step back and look at what’s really absurd about this situation, how it’s reported and dealt with. Don’t try to find humor directly in those most impacted. A lot of my shows have dealt with pretty intense social justice stuff. My last show (the Pulitzer Prize finalist Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord) was about running a mask sewing group during the pandemic.
Clearly, the point of humor isn’t “Oh! Isn’t it hilarious that one million Americans died?’ No. The absurdity was that I was running around like Jack in Lord of the Flies, tearing up bed sheets, trying to protect hospitals with masks I was making on a Hello Kitty sewing machine. The humor is how, in the most developed country in the world, a bunch of Aunties are running around trying to save others with home ec skills. The sick irony was that I was taking on the kind of labor that my grandparents took on, that they never wanted to take on, so that they could make a life in this country, and suddenly I’m doing that same labor but completely for free because this country didn’t prepare us.
Ultimately, for me, the message is. How do we keep our eyes on the prize, and how do we get to a place where we re-imagine a world where we don’t even need food banks?
For more information and tickets, go to: https://artsemerson.org/events/food-bank-influencer/
