ARTicles vol. 2 i.2: Director’s Notes

Snow in June is a revenge story about a young girl who was forced into marriage, wrongly accused of murder, and unjustly executed. Her spirit returns to take revenge on those who betrayed her. The play is inspired by a Chinese story written in the “Records of Spirits” during the fourth century, and was first dramatized as “The Injustice Done to Dou-er” by Guan Han-Qing, one of the greatest Chinese playwrights of the thirteenth century. Several years ago, I heard Qian Yi, who was then auditioning for the lead in my production of The Peony Pavilion, in the role of Dou-er at the Kunju Opera School in Shanghai, where she was a student. She performed a fifteen-minute segment of the play. I knew that I had discovered a star, and I was captivated by this material. It made me think about the seemingly infinite kinds of social injustice we read about and experience or witness every day. I became fixed on how those fifteen minutes of ancient music and text could be transported and incorporated into a new, universal version of the story of Dou-er that speaks to our times. My passion is to create my own vision of ancient Chinese classics, respecting but freely reinterpreting the performance tradition and bringing it onto the global stage in the twenty-first century in a revitalized form. In Snow in June, I wanted to create a movement-based dark comedy with the immediacy to engage the imagination of the spectators as they watch American actors speaking English and impersonating Chinese characters, without illustrating a literal Chinese world. During workshops at the American Repertory Theater, I worked with an incredible team of actors and designers, the playwright, and the composer. The actors borrow theatrical references from each other on stage, and as they intersect, they spark a new kind of storytelling. The gestural vocabulary, highly stylized vocal technique, and gender impersonation from Chinese theatre converge with the text’s poetic slang and the rural American musical idioms. We created a theatrical expression that is neither conventional Western theater nor traditional Chinese opera, but is a new kind of theater in which you can see both worlds at the same time.

Chen Shi-Zheng