Moving freely between the corporate hallways of Wall Street and the red splashed cubicles of sex clubs, "Dead Man's Socks" is a peek into the shifty alternate world of transacted identities and negotiated love. Both Dan and Chester are fans of a pop band and the whole play is, in fact, framed by the reverberations of the NY music scene of 70s and 80s. Dan has had a relationship with Paul for seven years buy is straying out of it. He meets Chester and finds that Chester has been obsessed with him for seven years. Ponzer is obsessed with conspiracy theories; Paul is obsessed with adopting a child and traditional values (Gay Mainstreaming). The lives of four young men collide and intersect in random patterns in a realistic play that breaks new stylistic ground for Ma-Yi Theater Company, which has become well-known to-date for plays about the Filipino-American experience and Pan-Asian texts.

The company, now in its fourteenth season, has specialized in crosscultural and intercultural collaborations between Asian and non-Asian artists. Its stories, while culturally specific, have been meant to be broad re-statements of the American experience. But in "Dead Men's Socks," only one character is Asian, and that is deliberate. Ralph B. Peña, who cites Nicky Silver (author of "Pterodactyls") and Richard Greenberg (author of "Three Days of Rain" and Bway's "Take Me Out") as his influences, has turned to simply writing about people. Ma-Yi treasures the opportunity to experiment and grow with new styles by performing at La MaMa, to stretch as a company and to be free of expectations which it encounters in other settings. Peña has taken to writing plays about the gay quotidian, and this is his first one to see light. (He has written two other plays that are "simply about people," titled "Tag" and "Fifth Exotic," but neither have been produced yet.).
Ma-Yi came to widespread notice with its productions of "Middle Finger" and "Watcher." Both were plays by Han Ong, who, at 33, became the youngest artist to ever earn the MacArthur Foundation's "genius" grant. Its other notable productions include "The Square," an anthology of short works by various authors (eight Asian and eight non-Asian) at the Public Theater (2001), "PeregriNasyon" by Chris Millado (1998), and other works including "Flipzoids" (OBIE, 1997), Portrait of an Artist as Filipino" and an adaptation of Brecht's "Mother Courage and Her Children" by Rodolfo Carlos Vera. The troupe is named for the ancient term Chinese traders used to refer to a group of islands that is known today as the Philippines. The name was chosen to recognize the vibrant culture that existed in Ma-Yi prior to the coming of the colonizers from the West.
Author/director Ralph B. Penais, a founding member and Artistic Director of Ma-Yi. He is an actor, director, and playwright. He has performed at The Grove Shakespeare Festival, The Public Theatre, La MaMa E.T.C. and The Round House Theatre, among others. His plays have been produced by Ma-Yi Theatre Company, The New WORLD Theatre in Amherst, MA, The Northwest Asian American Theatre in Seattle, Kumu Kahua Theatre in Honolulu, San Diego Asian American Repertory, The Cultural Center of the Philippines and the Public Theatre. He is the recipient of a commission from South Coast Repertory and a Rockefeller Foundation grant to the Bellagio Study Center in Italy. Mr. Pena has served on the artist panel of the New York State Council on the Arts since 1997. He was most recently seen in "Dogeaters" at the Public Theater. Last year, he and Ma-Yi made their La MaMa debut with "This End Up (A User's Manual for Lovers of Asians)," written and directed by Peña, which offered a diverting cabaret about the changing nature of the Asian-American lovescape. The evening combined a play on culturally-unexpected love affairs with a pastiche of old-fashioned songs (with new twists), yielding a funny, direct, yet romantic look at the dating game between Asians and non-Asians.