Chonburi International Hotel and Butterfly Club  By  cover art

Chonburi International Hotel and Butterfly Club

By: Shakina Nayfack
Narrated by: Shakina Nayfack,Kate Bornstein,Annie Golden,Telly Leung,Jason Tam,Bianca Leigh,Ivory Aquino,Pooya Mohseni,Samy Figaredo,Angelica Ross,Liz Lark Brown,Ita Segev,Dana Aliya Levinson

Go Behind the Scenes of Chonburi International Hotel & Butterfly Club

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About the Creator

Star of the NBC sitcom Connecting... Shakina can also be seen in Amazon’s GLAAD award-winning Transparent Musicale Finale, which she helped write and produce with Joey and Faith Soloway, and the Hulu original comedy Difficult People, for which she was also a writing consultant. Shakina is also the voice of Hana in the English dub of Satoshi Kon’s anime classic Tokyo Godfathers, and has appeared previously on television in Jessica Jones (Netflix), The Detour (TBS), and on Broadway in 24-Hour Plays and The Red Bucket Follies. She is the Founding Artistic Director of Musical Theatre Factory in New York City, where she helped to develop hundreds of new musicals including Michael R. Jackson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Strange Loop and her own autobiographical glam rock odyssey, Manifest Pussy. Shakina is currently developing a television pilot based on her life story, an original movie for Lifetime Television, and a rock opera, JUNK, with the Swedish pop band Brainpool. Recognitions include The Lilly Award for Working Miracles, Theatre Resources Unlimited Humanitarian Award, The Kilroys List, Logo 30, and two-time Drama League fellow and OUT 100 honoree. More at www.Shakina.nyc (http://www.shakina.nyc/) and @shakeenz

About the Director

Laura Savia is the Associate Artistic Director of the Tony Award-winning Williamstown Theatre Festival, where she is in her tenth season. Directing credits include the world premieres of James Anthony Tyler’s Artney Jackson (Williamstown), Lucy Thurber’s Once Upon a Time in the Berkshires and Orpheus in the Berkshires (Williamstown), Lucy Thurber’s Unstuck (59E59/Throughline), and Bareknuckle (Vertigo Theatre) as well Ryan Haddad’s Hi, Are You Single? (Public Theater, The Guthrie, Woolly Mammoth). Her production of Jonathan Caren’s The Recommendation for IAMA won two Ovation Awards, including Best Production. Other directing credits include James Lescesne’s The Absolute Brightness of Leonardy Pelkey (City Theatre), Adam Rapp’s Red Light Winter (Itself Festival in Poland) and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale featuring Hoon Lee (Warren Miller Performing Arts Center). She has directed short plays by Rob Askins and Halley Feiffer for Naked Angels and Living Newspaper plays by Sarah Burgess and Don Nguyen (at A.R.T./Club Oberon, Joe’s Pub, and Le Poisson Rouge). She has developed work with Roundabout Theatre Company, New York Theatre Workshop, Atlantic Theater Company, Second Stage, Labyrinth Theater Company, Ars Nova, Playwrights Realm, Primary Stages, Rattlestick, and Ma-Yi Theater Company. Assistant directing includes Broadway’s The Merchant of Venice, starring Al Pacino. Laura spent five seasons on the artistic staff at Atlantic Theater Company. She is an alum of the Drama League Directors Project and Northwestern University.

Thai Voiceovers by: Riw Rakkulchon (GAMON), Sura Siu (HOM)
Sound Design by: Joanna Fang
Dialect Coaches: Joy Lanceta Coronel, Barbara Rubin
Cultural Competence Consultant: Riw Rakkulchon
Assistant Director: Charlie Barnett IV
Executive Producer for Audible: Kate Navin
Producer for Audible: Jessica Amato
Executive Producer for Williamstown Theatre Festival: Mandy Greenfield
Producer for Williamstown Theatre Festival: Aileen Lambert
Staff for Williamstown Theatre Festival
Antonello Di Benedetto, Director of Audience Engagement
Mandy Greenfield, Artistic Director
Henrietta Key, Development Coordinator
Aileen Lambert, Literary Manager
Lucie Ledbetter, Line Producer
Josh Martinez-Nelson, Director of Development & Communications
Amy Russell, Director of Finance
Laura Savia, Associate Artistic Director
Lindsey Turteltaub, Director of Production
Lianna Rada-Hung, Assistant to the Artistic Director
For over six decades, Williamstown Theatre Festival, recipient of the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre and the Commonwealth Award for Achievement, has brought emerging and professional theatre artists together to create a thrilling summer festival of premiere work alongside fresh, new productions of the western canon, accompanying cultural events including Community Works and Late-Night Cabarets, and readings and workshops of new plays. Under Artistic Director Mandy Greenfield, WTF launched the Andrew Martin-Weber New Play and Musical Commissioning Program, through which theatre artists, including Jocelyn Bioh, Nathan Alan Davis, Halley Feiffer, Justin Levine, Matthew Lopez, Jiehae Park, Benjamin Scheuer, and many others, create new work supported by a year-round play development program. WTF runs unmatched training programs for new generations of theatre talent, and artists and productions shaped at WTF fill theatres in New York, London, and around the country each season. Williamstown Theatre Festival’s productions of The Bridges of Madison County, The Elephant Man, Fool for Love, Living on Love, and The Visit enjoyed critically acclaimed runs on Broadway, with The Elephant Man and The Visit receiving Tony Award nominations for Best Revival of a Play and Best Revival of a Musical, respectively. WTF's world premiere productions of Cost of Living (winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama), Actually, Paradise Blue, and Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow played acclaimed Off-Broadway runs. In the abbreviated 2019-20 theatrical season, Williamstown Theatre Festival was represented or scheduled to be represented on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and regionally by The Sound Inside and Grand Horizons, both of which received Tony Award nominations for Best Play, The Rose Tattoo, Seared, Selling Kabul, Unknown Soldier, and Lempicka. Visit us at www.wtfestival.org.
The playwright wishes to thank The Drama League's Beatrice Terry Residency, Daryl Roth, Natasha Sinha, Beehive Dramaturgy Studio, Playwrights Horizons, Rachel Jett, and the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center’s National Theatre Institute.
Williamstown Theatre Festival would like to thank 321 Theatrical Management, Telsey & Company and DKC/O&M.

Featuring

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What listeners say about Chonburi International Hotel and Butterfly Club

Average Customer Ratings
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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Moving, funny, real, important

This new play from Shakina Nayfack is so wonderfully uplifting. I started listening expecting to learn more of her experience, but was surprised at how funny it was, and how much I related to every character in it. This beautifully written window into the world of gender confirmation lays bare how much we ALL desperately want the world to see us the way we see ourselves.

6 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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Changing The Narrative

Quick--think of a piece of fiction with more than one transgender actor and/or character. You probably can't, because a transgender person is usually a single character in a piece. Having a community of transgender performers tell such a moving story of the community that forms around the process of transformation is perfection. And hopefully changes the narrative to tell more stories like these.

The performances are amazing with a real sense of character behind each one. The audio engineering was also flawless, giving a real sense of space.

Cannot recommend this enough.

6 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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Absolutely Adore this Play

Visceral and deep, this has the power to change lives through listening. Well worth it!

5 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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Just Extraordinary

A beautifully written and acted tale of a group of Trans women and their loved ones in an aftercare facility in Thailand. The characters are wonderful and fully human. The themes explored are universal. Audible has made what was originally a stage play into a wonderful audio drama. Lots of humor and pathos, Playwright Shakina Nayfack and director Laura Savia do a brilliant job.

5 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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Transcendent

This story, in this form, is an immersion in vulnerability, empathy, and personal struggle. Its characters are raw and beautiful and flawed and strong. Shakina Nayfack is a powerhouse, and the cast. slays.

4 people found this helpful

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Fun, smart, critical and occasionally transcendent

I listened to this play in a long walk. As a trans woman it spoke honestly to a lot of my personal experiences. I cried a lot, laughed a lot, and wished I’d had a group like this when I had surgery. It’s a fun, smart, critical, and occasionally transcendent rendering of what is a cosmically profound moment in many trans women’s lives. Highly recommended! It’s a well produced and fast moving play with multiple actors playing multiple characters interacting in complex scenes with sound and foley effects that pull you into this world and go beyond what I would usually expect from an audiobook.

2 people found this helpful

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I haven’t heard anything like this

To start, I’ve never seen or heard a play like this. I stumbled upon this play without knowing what it was about, and I was captivated by the experience of listening to transwomen mingle and gossip while recovering from gender-confirmation surgery. I felt a little condescended to at times, but overall I felt like I learned a lot.

2 people found this helpful

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Stellar

This theatre experience strikes deep into the heart, and helped me to see into a world I haven’t known. Very meaningful.

2 people found this helpful

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Important and Timely

It's rare to get to see such a vibrant play about the trans experience even in a normal year of theatre, so to hear it in a year with so few theatre experiences available was a wonderful gift. I highly recommend people listen to it, this audio production is excellent, immersive, and moving. I hope there is more to come with this play in the future!

2 people found this helpful

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Historic and moving

When I first heard that Shakina Nayfack’s new play CHONBURI INTERNATIONAL HOTEL & BUTTERFLY CLUB would be produced as an Audible play instead of a fully staged production at WTF, I was sad. But how thrilling it was to listen to this piece on Audible and still feel so connected to the characters and the story. It’s so rare that we have stories about trans people written and performed by trans artists, and this play feels somewhat historic in that sense. And even without seeing a fully realized set, I totally felt like I was right there inside a hotel lobby at the top of the play, thanks to the many talents that went into this Audible version.

2 people found this helpful

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  • Caron Elliott
  • 01-02-22

Wonderful

“Never miss a chance to walk down a staircase!”
The actors were amazing, the story was heartwarming and heart breaking. I really recommend this!

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  • Anne Gamble
  • 02-18-23

Terrible accents!

Great story and important story, but the accents are absolutely atrocious and really detract from the story. I'm really glad I didn't pay for this!