Alison Kuo is playing her grandmother's general at the New Museum tonight

Alison Kuo's grandmother sang Cantonese opera in Hong Kong. "She would always perform the role of a military general," Kuo said. The costume that came with it was a beard.

After her grandmother died, that beard and the stage photographs came to Kuo. This weekend, at the New Museum, she is wearing the part herself.

In Cantonese opera, crossing gender on stage is common. Her grandmother did it as the general, in the beard.

Thursday already happened. Tonight, Friday, October 23, is 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. Saturday, October 24, is 3 to 4 p.m. Both are sold out. Each show is an hour, in the New Museum Theater at 235 Bowery.

Access Pass Plus members and New Museum Fellows can ask for complimentary public-program tickets at membership@newmuseum.org. Hours and the sold-out marks are on the New Museum event page.

The piece is called A flame latches to a bit of straw. The Chinese title beside it, 薪火相傳, is a flame catching on a scrap of straw, which is how you talk about handing something on. It opens with Kuo and her cousin Anna Kuo looking through those photographs and the beard.

Kuo lives in Brooklyn. In Manhattan's Chinatown she makes sculptures from things she finds, and she works as a community organizer. Since June she has had a studio on the museum's sixth floor, close enough to build the sets from the shops and streets nearby.

There are toy ponies on a headpiece, thrift-store ceramic dogs with glitter stick-on nails, and sequins on a warrior's armor. Some costumes are borrowed from Cantonese opera singers who still perform in the neighborhood. A few of the dresses were her grandmother's.

One duet is from the 1962 opera Unfinished Love and Hatred in the Phoenix Pavilion, about a princess in a strange country who has lost her memory and cannot speak. They close with Vera Lynn's "We'll Meet Again," from 1939, sung in Cantonese.

MeeMee Chin, Kuo's opera mentor, sings with Wai Wah Law and Ying Ying Zhu. All three already perform in Manhattan's Chinatown, with local musicians on traditional instruments.

Annika Cheng, a dancer and textile artist from Queens, helped design some of the costumes. Mark Bolling, the next-door neighbor, used to go-go dance, and he is on stage too.

So is Mei Brunette, a teenager whose mother, the writer Ava Chin, started Sisters in Self-Defense with Kuo in 2021. In rehearsal the cast improvised, and those notes shaped the show.

The W.O.W. Project is a Chinatown arts and anti-gentrification group founded in 2016, based in the oldest continuously operating store in the neighborhood. Kuo went to one of its first events, then to opera workshops there. A couple of those teachers are in the show.

"It's good to have friends in the neighbourhood," she said. They have had mahjong parties in the studio.

She says the character she plays, a version of herself, changes by the end. She feels more confident, "celebrating taking part in an art form that has endured for hundreds of years."

Our take: email the membership desk this morning if you still want in. It is one hour, the room is already full, and the reason to be there is her grandmother's beard, on a stage dressed from the Chinatown shops a few blocks away.