ARTicles vol. 2 i.2: The Transformation of Tou O

When the playwright Charles Mee was working on his adaptation of Kuan Han-ch’ing’s thirteenth-century Chinese drama The Injustice Done to Tou O, he met the director Chen Shi-Zheng and actress Qian Yi for tea one afternoon. As they were discussing the ancient text, Qian Yi, who was trained in the kunju school of opera in Shanghai, mentioned that she knew a sequence from a musical adaptation of the play. In the middle of the bustling Greenwich Village teashop, she stood up and began singing in Chinese. Mee was stunned by Qian Yi’s virtuoso performance, and immediately knew this traditional passage would be the finale of his modern adaptation.

The piece Qian Yi sang is the lament of the young girl, Tou O, as she’s being led to her execution. Dating back to the fourth century, the myth of Tou O was dramatized by Kuan Han-ch’ing during the Yuan dynasty, when Mongol invaders from the north had forced much of the Chinese population into slavery. Subsequently, the story was turned into a musical drama.

One of the most famous folk tales in China, the legend of Tou O is still taught to schoolchildren today. The story begins when Tou O’s father goes to study in the capital and leaves his motherless daughter with an old widow. After many years, the young girl is falsely accused of poisoning an old man. Forced into confessing to a crime she didn’t commit to spare the old widow, Tou O endures a mockery of a trial and is sentenced to death. As she is about to be executed, the young girl proclaims that if she dies unjustly, the region will suffer a drought, her blood will run up a piece of white silk instead of dripping down to the ground, and snow will fall in the middle of summer.

Chen Shi-Zheng is attracted to Yuan drama for its focus on injustice. As part of last summer’s Lincoln Center Festival, he staged The Orphan of Zhao, a thirteenth-century play about a general who invents a charge of false treason to destroy a rival’s family. “I turned to the ancient Chinese texts because many ancient playwrights wrote with great skill about social injustice, the lower classes, and the proletariat,” Chen reflects. “I think that theatre is a social issue. It’s not about a few people discussing their own personal problems. There isn’t enough theater that deals with the problems I see in our everyday world–immigration problems, human trafficking, poverty. I want the audience to recognize the horror of the reality around us.”

In order to make this thirteenth-century drama more relevant to a twenty-first-century audience, Chen decided to transport Kuan’s play to a contemporary American milieu. Charles Mee’s experience adapting the texts of such ancient playwrights as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and the Yuan dramatist Li Qianfu made him an ideal collaborator. “When I began adapting Greek texts, I clearly understood that I was taking something from the public domain,” says Mee when asked about his process as a writer. “That’s why I put all my work on the internet and let other people take and reuse it. I think this is what civilization does anyway. Nobody makes something brand new. Everybody takes the world that we live in and tries to reshape it and remake it. Culture offers material and then individuals filter it through a very particular psyche that exists at a very particular moment in time. And that makes something unique.”

Although both Chen and Mee are great admirers of the ancient text, neither was satisfied with the ending of Kuan’s play, in which the girl’s father returns from the capital, realizes his daughter was mistreated, and dispenses justice. “In the original play, the moral of the story is, ‘if only the central government knew, everything would be okay,'” explains Mee. “It’s a massive propaganda piece for the central government. So we cut that off, and I had her come back and murder everybody, which suggests that you can take the nicest, sweetest, most wonderful woman in the world, and turn her into a homicidal maniac if you treat her badly enough.”

Mee’s bloodbath ending provoked the director to reconsider the entire structure of the play. During a three-week workshop last May, Chen began reorganizing Mee’s adaptation to make the young girl’s revenge the through-line of the production. In Chen’s adaptation of Mee’s script, the young girl returns from the dead in the first scene and begins exacting her revenge. Reversing the linear narrative of Mee’s script, Chen reset the play in a dreamlike world. “At the end of the ancient play, the girl says the world will turn upside down when she’s killed,” offers the director. “That curse has come true in this production. Everything has been broken into pieces.” Although the structure of Mee’s adaptation has changed significantly, the production still ends with Qian Yi’s Chinese song. “I wanted to keep that moment as the finale,” adds Chen, “because it explains all the anger and killings the audience witnesses over the course of the production.”

A veteran of the Chinese opera, Chen came to the United States in 1987 in search of directorial freedom. For Chen, Chinese opera was a dead, inflexible form. “It was impossible to create a personal style of expression in China,” he explains. “In the Chinese opera, no one rethinks the story–there’s no modern perception about how the story is relevant to a twenty-first-century audience. A lot of traditional art dies away because people practice it without asking questions.” Even after Chen left China, he still had to struggle with the rigidity of Chinese cultural censorship. In 1998, his controversial production of the fifty-five act kunju opera The Peony Pavilion was prevented from participating in the Lincoln Center Festival by the Shanghai City Bureau of Culture. Accusing Chen’s twenty-hour staging of the play of being “feudal, superstitious, and pornographic,” the cultural bureaucrats refused to allow the sets, props, costumes, and performers to leave Shanghai, where the production had been rehearsing for a year. Top advisors from the Clinton administration intervened in the imbroglio, and the production was eventually allowed to participate in the Festival the following summer. Ironically, many of the “faults” the Chinese bureaucrats cited in the production were scenes Chen had staged with great historical accuracy.

Chen’s recent productions have fused Eastern and Western styles, combining a physical language derived from the Chinese theater with European and American approaches to building a character. “I’m fascinated by how gesture and body language can indicate emotion and tell a story,” he says. “I want the American actors to understand how emotion and human psychology can be executed through precise gestures and through voice, as in the Chinese theater. And I want Qian Yi to learn from American actors, who prepare for a role by finding real-life models in contemporary society.”

Chen has already worked with three of the four lead actors in the Snow in June cast. Rob Campbell and David Patrick Kelly performed in The Orphan of Zhao this past summer. Qian Yi starred in The Peony Pavilion, and was also in The Orphan of Zho and Chen’s recent staging of the Monteverdi Vespers for Boston’s Handel & Haydn Society. In addition to drawing from Qian Yi’s background in the Chinese opera, Chen is also encouraging the actress to use her personal experience to develop her character. “This play is about a young girl being thrown into a strange world,” he reflects. “And that’s very much Qian Yi’s own immigrant story. She came to this country as a Chinese girl who didn’t know the language.”

Like the acting style, the scenic designs of Chen’s productions are characterized by a combination of the traditional and the modern. The focus of The Snow in June set is a huge billboard image of a traditional Chinese flower painting – a modern translation of a classic image replete with the signs of a rich, vital life. “The billboard is a commercial advertisement that dominates the stage,” the director explains. “If you go to Times Square, you see advertisements with beautifully dressed-up people that send out optimistic messages. But these are false messages. Their beauty is a decoration. It has nothing to do with actual reality or suffering–especially the suffering in a small town or the suffering of the lower classes. When you light our billboard from the front, it looks like a gorgeous flower exploding into the audience. But when you backlight it, you see the metallic structure holding it up.”

The billboard is made of plexiglass, one of Chen’s favorite design materials. Drawn to plastics because of their ubiquity in our modern world, Chen uses the material in many productions. “We associate metal with the industrial revolution,” offers Chen. “Wood is a traditional material. But plastic is a modern material that fascinates me. You can create a magical, surreal world with it.” Chen’s attraction to plastics often adds an element of kitsch to his work. “Thick kitsch is fantastic,” he says. “It’s both charming and laughable. It’s like the sugar coating on a bitter pill. When I stage such a harsh story, with so much cruelty, I need to coat it in pink sugar.”

Ryan McKittrick is the A.R.T.’s Associate Dramaturg