Love You Wrong Time uncovers the horrors of dating as an Asian woman

When Maddie Bautista and Deanna H. Choi first started writing Love You Wrong Time, they turned to some strange — and sometimes dark — corners of the internet.

They looked at personal ads on Craigslist, combed through Reddit forums, and set up a phone line to get in touch with strangers and learn about their stances on dating Asian women. Love You Wrong Time explores what Bautista and Choi observed about how certain cultures are fetishized in relationships, combined with stories from their own love lives.

The cabaret-style musical is both co-written and performed by Bautista and Choi, who compare the work to the likes of Bo Burnham and Ali Wong — stand-up comedy and music coming together to create "a good time, with teeth."

Asian women have historically been portrayed in media as being obedient, hyper-feminine and sexually appealing because they're "exotic," so people expect them to act this way in real life, too. Love You Wrong Time challenges that by spotlighting women who make noise.

"Through all this research, a few different throughlines emerged, and they formed … something that we wanted to poke fun at, and something we wanted to subvert and ultimately find our own agency within," says Choi.

One of Bautista's favourite moments from the piece is "Your Body Is the Future," a pop anthem she wrote when her partner was exploring his gender. It's her way of showing queer Asians that they can take up space, rather than feeling pressured to stay submissive and quiet.

After a sold-out Toronto premiere of the work in 2023, Choi and Bautista toured it across Canada last year. It was well-received in Vancouver and is now running again from May 1–11 at the Cultch's Historic Theatre. The duo also recently announced they'll be taking the work to Ottawa's National Arts Centre this August.

Aside from sharing bad experiences with dating, Choi and Bautista's friendship and artistic collaboration was founded on their love of composition and sound design.

"We bonded over the fact that there are very few women of colour in our line of work, especially women of Asian descent," says Choi. She and Bautista have worked together ever since they first met in 2016, and Love You Wrong Time is extra special to them because its co-written compositions span so many years of collaboration.

Choi originally studied neuroscience, but found herself really enjoying working in technical theatre. She sees it as both an art and a science, and said her background doing academic research on music's effect on the brain influences her approach to planning out the technical side of a show. 

Bautista comes from a theatre performance background, and she thinks the different paths they took into the arts cause them to have very different perspectives on composition, but that this diversity makes the end result appeal to more people.

"[We] approach music really differently, which is so cool," Bautista says. "I think the marriage of our styles in Love You Wrong Time makes the music quite different and entertaining, and very direct … We end up creating an experience where everyone belongs and is implicated."

This meshing of perspectives is especially visible within the set of the piece, which resembles "a boudoir explod[ing] into an Asian night market," says Choi. Audience members can keep an eye out for items that draw on staples of various Asian cultures, like suitcases painted to look like the chrysanthemum tea and the soy milk Tetra-Paks that are familiar to so many Chinese kids.

Including specific cultural references are part of the show's goal to speak to people who might resonate with the subject matter, even if they don't usually enjoy theatre. 

"The audiences who are most excited to see us are people who are in the midst of their dating lives, so young Asian people, folks of colour — people who may not necessarily consume a lot of theatre work, but just want to experience something new," Bautista says.

Bautista and Choi often wonder whether works revolving around the fetishization of Asian women will become relics of the past, but they've realized perspectives won't be changing anytime soon. That's why they want to give people affected by it a way to cope. 

"We always think that at some point this show will stop being relevant, and in a sad, strange way, it hasn't," Choi says. "We wanted to make space for rage and grief, and the best way that we could find to do that was through humour and through song."

Love You Wrong Time runs May 1-11 at The Cultch's Historic Theatre (1895 Venables St.) in Vancouver.