No Pressure Creatives, Georgetown’s only Asian American and Pacific Islander theater organization, is currently performing Out of Sync, a completely student-written musical, in Gaston Hall.
The production process started in May 2025 with script development by playwrights Shlok Pathak (CAS ’27) and Hans Yang (SFS ’28); auditions followed in October. The personnel involved consist of five principal actors alongside ten ensemble members, as well as a full pit band. The crew rehearsed for two to five hours per week until their opening night on March 26.
The musical follows Kat, a high school senior in the Bay Area suffering from severe senioritis at school and pressure from her mother to succeed at home. To alleviate her stress, she relies on her friend Carlos’ newest creation, an AI robot named Suki, to replace her in the house while she goes to parties and spends the rest of her senior year her way. However, Suki is quick to learn and slowly grows more autonomous, causing problems for Kat, her mother and brother, and Carlos. All the while, Kat and her family are experiencing growing pains, with Kat’s journey to college on the horizon. Characters fight, laugh, yell, cry, and party as they try to navigate the chaos that surrounds them in a strangely realistic AI horrorscape.
Pathak, writer and director of Out of Sync, was initially inspired to write the musical after watching Lady Bird (2017) and Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiyaj (2024), a robot-themed Bollywood movie.
“I remember watching this [Bollywood] movie, and I was like, ‘this sucks.’ …But the concept that it’s on is really cool, and I was like, ‘it’d be cool if we could elaborate on something like that,’” Pathak explained. As the writing process continued, Pathak realized how difficult this project would prove to be. However, Pathak and Yang didn’t let anything stop them. “We chose to write a mother-daughter story, and neither of us are mothers nor daughters. Or even women,” Pathak said. “It was ambitious, but I had a lot of fun doing the whole process. It was long, and it was grueling, but it was amazing.”
According to Pathak, writing a musical is a huge undertaking for anyone, but it becomes even more difficult when the project is self-led.
“It was a test in self-discipline, I think … because I guess with an internship and whatnot, you have a boss. You have someone telling you what to do. But when you’re writing your own project, you’re kind of your own boss,” he said.
While the writers had fun with the humorous aspect of an AI robot replacing a high school senior, they also sought to convey a deeper message about love during times of change.
Pathak explained, “In families, especially Asian families, sometimes that kind of thing can go [unsaid]. It’s like, ‘Well, of course I’ll be here for you forever and everything. I don’t need to keep telling you about that.’ I think that juxtaposing those ideas of love as attention versus love as affirmation and balancing those two is one of the biggest things that we wanted our audience to be able to [take away from] this.”
The expression of love, and how it differs, is a central theme of the show in Pathak’s eyes. “I think it’s something that a lot of people can relate to, especially in their high school years.”
Jessica Cao (SFS ’28), who played the lead role of Kat in Out of Sync, described how attentive love can become restrictive.
“I think everyone experiences tensions with their friends and their family, and when you get so stressed that you feel like you need someone to stand in for you, that’s when you start to see your life fall apart,” she said. “I think a lot of people kind of empathize with the feeling of losing control and trying to take it back, even when it could be your fault that you lost it in the first place.”
This is a central theme in the show. At times, family ties get so tight you feel like you can’t breathe, and Out of Sync portrays how genuine love can strain familial bonds in stressful times.
Cao’s performance as Kat was influenced by her own friends and family.
“I find people that I feel like resemble who my character is and take different parts of their personality,” Cao said. “I’m from Los Angeles. I’m playing someone from the Bay Area, and I’m also playing someone who is a high school senior, stressed about college decisions, and I remember exactly what [that] feels like.”
Character building is often taxing, requiring intense emotional effort. However, for Cao, the process was extremely rewarding.
“I feel like doing theater has brought back who I am as a person, and especially because Georgetown is really pre-professional, having an artistic outlet, especially this semester, has been really relieving,” she explained. “I think it’s the only thing keeping me sane, [alongside] my friends.”
While there are many theater groups on campus, No Pressure Creatives provides a community specifically for Asian American and Pacific Islander students. Cao describes finding belonging in this vibrant theater community at Georgetown, stating that “having an Asian American theater troupe on campus is really important for representation. [It] also [gives] me and my friends a really great community to meet people … I [wouldn’t] have encountered outside of theater.”
Outside of the creative process, No Pressure Creatives is led by a strong team of logistical players, including Out of Sync producer Shiva Ranganathan (SOH ’27). Ranganthan, who has been involved in the club since its second year, recently moved into the role after spending time writing and arranging the musical components of the prior shows.
While he manages the tight funding and equipment of the show in order to produce the high-quality original work, Ranganathan honors the dozens of students behind the scenes who spend hours putting in the work.
“I have a lot of very capable people around me; I can’t even pretend like I’m doing all the work,” he said. “That’s also a really cool part of it is that…if we need, like, audio, visual tech, I know that there’s someone who’s much more experienced than me who can figure that out better.”
As one of the only groups on campus that puts on a completely original show every year, No Pressure Creatives offers unique opportunities for collaboration that come from the producer-performer relationship. Ranganatha felt that being able to connect over shared experiences and identities and explore these themes together while creating the production was rewarding for the group.
“It’s very unique in that performers and the producers of the work get to work in tandem to make the final product what it is,” Ranganathan said. “I think that that’s the biggest thing, showing people arts is a process in and of itself.”
Ranganathan finds the musical’s themes of navigating family relationships, handling the pressure of perfectionism, and learning to let go to be refreshing and easy for audiences to relate to. As an Asian-led group, he believes that telling these stories through a creative outlet like theatre, where Asians and Asian-Americans are already underrepresented and stereotyped, is imperative.
“These are very common Asian themes. I think that we learn as we’re growing up, realizing that not everything’s perfect,” Ranganathan said. “The characters aren’t just one person’s experience or one person’s Asian experience. They’re kind of an amalgamation of everyone in the club’s.”
After nearly a year of production, No Pressure Creatives is proud to perform Out of Sync for Georgetown audiences. As the group learns to adapt, embrace challenges, and build on personal experiences, they invite students to connect with their characters, sway to their songs, and find community on the Hilltop.
You can catch Out of Sync tonight, March 27, at Gaston Hall at 7 p.m. Tickets are available on CampusGroups.
