Snow in Midsummer u.s. premiere Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, based on the classical Chinese The Injustice to Dou Yi That Moved Heaven and Earth by

Directed by Justin Audibert

Workers Chen, Fang, Huang and Zhou Factory workers. Frequent patrons of Nurse Wong’s bar.

Doctor Lu and Judge Wu Notes by Christine Mok, Members of the professional-managerial class of New Harmony. Snow in Midsummer Jessica Ko (Dou Yi) Production Dramaturg Mother Cai Blind masseuse. Both Dou Yi’s adoptive mother and her mother-in-law. Who’s Who Ox-Head and Horse-Face Doui Y Figures from Chinese Buddhism who escort the A young widow of New Harmony who sells hand- souls of the dead to the underworld. icrafts. She is accused of murder and executed.

Master Zhang The Story Deceased patriarch. An army official who owned the factories of New Harmony, he was a famous Dou Yi, a young widow, is accused of a murder singer and was often on tour. that she did not commit. At her execution, she vows to prove her innocence and prophesies Handsome Zhang ecological disaster. His son. Fashionable, entrepreneurial. Freed from Three years later, New Harmony is ravaged his ties to New Harmony by the factory’s immi- by drought and plagued by locusts. Still, the bars nent sale, he proposes to his love and makes are open and the factory workers eat, drink and plans to move out of the drought-ridden town. gossip, because someone new has come into town: Tianyun Lin, a self-made businesswoman, Nurse Wong who arrives to buy New Harmony’s ailing facto- Proprietress of a local bar. Formerly Handsome ries from Handsome Zhang. Zhang’s nursemaid, now his staunch supporter. Handsome cannot wait to leave town and marry his lover, Rocket Wu. With so much change Rocket Wu and possibility, who cares that it is Ghost Month, Handsome’s fiancé. He would like to move some- when the boundary between the living and the where cosmopolitan and verdant. dead is thin, and it is inauspicious to embark on new ventures that might attract the attention Tianyun Lin of restless spirits. No one follows the old ways in A.k.a. Boss Lin, the newest owner of the facto- New China, though maybe they should. ries in New Harmony after she buys them from When her daughter, Fei-Fei, becomes a conduit Handsome. A self-made woman and mother. for Dou Yi’s vengeful ghost, Tianyun must solve past and present mysteries to expose the injustic- Fei-Fei Lin es Dou Yi suffered before her curse destroys every Her six-year-old daughter. Adopted. living thing.

50 The Golden Age of Chinese Drama new harmony

Snow in Midsummer is a contemporary adapta- found inspiration in literary tales, histories Snow in Midsummer is set in tion of a canonical Chinese drama, Dou E Yuan, from earlier dynasties, and popular tales passed the fictional New Harmony, a a beloved play from the . Though through oral traditions that imparted Confucian millennia of recorded history prior to values. Yuan drama mixed both high and low remote factory town in Jiangsu the Yuan dynasty exists—with Chinese actors, culture, reflecting the literary aspirations of their Province, on the east coast of even today, tracing their craft to the famous Pear authors, without neglecting the entertaining China. Jiangsu today is a major Orchard Conservatory established during the high jinks that their non-elite audiences demand- Tang dynasty (618–907)—Yuan drama is consid- ed. The plays are full of romance, adventure and industrial center with a number ered the golden age of Chinese theatre. Within the supernatural. Enough plays deal with the of economic development the span of a century, some of the greatest works criminal justice system to suggest that the exiled zones that have helped boost of classical Chinese drama were written and pro- scholar-playwrights wove critiques of their dimin- duced. Today, more than 160 plays, known as zaju, ished experience under Mongolian rule into plays GDP, setting China on a path from this era are extant. Zaju flourished under that grappled with morality and injustice. toward becoming the world’s Mongolian rule and especially during the reign of largest economy. (1260–1294), becoming the dominant Guan Hanqing dramatic form, thus taking on the name of the Of the dramatists working during this time, Guan In the play, Tianyun Lin dynasty, Yuan drama. Hanqing (ca. 1245–ca. 1322) is the best known. begins her bootstrapping in When invaded and conquered China, He is the first playwright listed in A Register Shenzhen, the first Special they unified north and south, connecting people of Ghosts, a record of poets and playwrights, and cultures through trade and empire across published in 1330. He was a prolific writer, play- Economic Zone (SEZ) in the Asia, Eurasia and Europe. The Yuan dynasty was ing a large role in theatrical innovation and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), an era of unprecedented cultural and artistic cultural boom of a decisive historical age. His as a migrant worker who moves advances in a variety of fields, including poetry, writings moved from the popular stage into theatre, painting, mathematics and medicine. canonical literature, both of which maintained up from assembly worker to While many enjoyed peace and prosperity, cultural and aesthetic significance over the ages. owner of a faux flower empire. educated elite found their social Guan is often acknowledged in Western texts as Now she is poised to purchase and political power greatly diminished under “China’s Shakespeare.” Considering that Guan the Mongols. The civil-service examinations preceded Shakespeare by more than 300 years, New Harmony’s factories. that had determined court positions and orga- Shakespeare may be Brittania’s Guan Hanqing. These development zones nized bureaucratic imperial life were abolished. Either trained for a life in medicine or a practicing are special areas exempt from Displaced Confucian scholar-officials turned to court physician, he lived in Yen-Ching, the site of the arts, especially poetry and playwriting, to modern-day Beijing. He began writing plays in certain laws and regulations to make a living and seek glory. 1260 and wrote more than 60, 18 of which have encourage foreign investment With the Confucian literati joining theatrical survived. These extant works are now exemplary and boost economic growth. troupes as playwrights, the plays fused a new forms of classical Chinese drama, with a robust narrative tradition with older musical perfor- history of revival and adaption. His best-known While SEZs, especially mance practices to create Yuan drama: popular play is Dou E Yuan, or The Injustice to Dou Yi that Shenzhen, are heralded as variety plays with songs, dance, monologues, Moved Heaven and Earth, the source play for economic successes, enriching farce and probably acrobatics. Yuan playwrights Cowhig’s Snow in Midsummer. foreign investors and the PRC, their wealth and progress have Selected Chinese Dynasties and Periods notoriously come at the expense Yuan Dynasty 1279–1368 of workers. Most are migrant 1368–1644 “zone” workers who labor and Qing Dynasty 1644–1912 live under a double-edged sword Republic 1912–1949 of both capitalist exploitation People’s Republic 1949– and state repression.

51 Snow in Midsummer

rsc and china

Before its U.S. debut at OSF, Dou E Yuan tells the tale of Dou E, who, as piety and the way she cares for Cai reveal the Snow in Midsummer premiered a girl, is given by her father, a poor Confucian play’s Confucian values, it also demonstrates the scholar-in-training, to Mistress Cai as payment limits of Confucian divine justice (yi), with not in February 2017 at the Swan for a debt. Dou E grows up and marries Cai’s son, one “bad” judge, but two. Dou E must become an Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, though she is soon a widow. When a client tries active agent in her own redemption and inter- England, Shakespeare’s birth- to strangle Mistress Cai instead of paying off his cede in the world of the living. While the wrongs debt, she is rescued by Old Zhang and his son, that she endures stem from her vulnerability as place. Commissioned and pro- Donkey. Both Zhangs try to force the women to a woman (both as a girl and a young widow), at duced by the Royal Shakespeare marry them. Dou E refuses because she is faith- her death and after, Dou E demands justice at the Company (RSC), Cowhig’s adap- ful to her deceased husband. Donkey concocts individual, societal and cosmological level—and a plan to poison Cai, assuming that Dou E will gets it. Dou E is part of a lineage in Chinese litera- tation is the first production in marry him with Cai out of the picture. Old Zhang ture of phantom heroines. the RSC’s Chinese Translations accidentally drinks the poison and dies. Donkey Project, a cultural-exchange accuses Dou E of murder and presents her with a A modern ghost choice: marry him or be arrested. She still refuses Snow in Midsummer’s Dou Yi, as Cowhig spells it, program that brings Chinese him and is brought before the Prefect. Dou E is a phantom heroine for a new age. In Cowhig’s classics to a new audience. and Cai are tortured, and Dou E falsely admits to adaptation, the playwright builds upon Guan’s The Chinese Translations the crime to spare her mother-in-law more pain. Dou E, adds tropes from contemporary Hollywood When Dou E is sentenced to death, she foretells and Japanese horror films, and draws upon long- Project draws a lineage between supernatural and natural events that move heav- standing Chinese spiritual traditions. Because Shakespeare and works written en and earth. These include snow in midsummer the afterlife plays such a large part in Chinese in China that were performed or and a three-year drought. Three years later, her religious and spiritual life, drama and literature father returns as a court-appointed scholar-offi- feature a rich variety of ghosts and spirits. Beliefs adapted within Shakespeare’s cial. It is only when she appears to him as a about ghosts are closely tied to ancestor worship lifetime (1564–1616) in the Yuan, ghost, and tells her tale of woe, that her father and then inflected by religious syncretism, which Song, Tang and Ming dynas- avenges her. combines Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. Because the Yuan stage used minimal formal According to this syncretic belief system, Diyu is ties—exceptionally rich periods scenery and props and had a more boisterous the land of the dead, or “hell,” which is presided in Chinese artistic and cultural audience than is usual today, the play relies on over by King Yama or a decentralized passel of history. With research on more prose to narrate onstage action and the passage judges. Before Ox-Head and Horse-Face, the of time. For contemporary audiences, Dou E Yuan guardians of the underworld, bring the newly than 45 classical Chinese titles feels repetitive, with characters telling the audi- dead to Yama for sentencing, souls linger at the nominated by scholars, academ- ence again (and again) who they are and what Home Gazing Terrace to view the world of the ics, theatremakers, playwrights has happened, even as they also set the audience living. Upon judgment, these souls are relocated up for what is about to happen. While this repeti- to different levels. At each level, spirits atone for and translators from across the tive quality is a function of the form, theatre past sins, like the souls of Dante’s Purgatorio world, the RSC has matched scholar Evan Darwin Winet explains the drama- and Inferno, except here, they are in preparation translators and academics with turgical consequences of playing with time: for reincarnation. “[T]he sketch of past and present acquires an Ghosts do find their way out, especially playwrights. For Snow in Mid- almost ceremonial clarity of presentation. It is during the seventh lunar month, which is Hungry summer, Cowhig worked with the outline of moral illustration, but it is also the Ghost month. From mid-August into September translator Gigi Chang, creating outline of a tragedy at once individual, social, and in southern China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, as —in the face of death—cosmological.” well as Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore, it is her adaptation from Chang’s In the fourth act of Guan Hanqing’s play, believed that the gates of hell unseal and the literal translation of Guan Dou E appears as a ghost and informs the audi- dead return to the world of the living. Temple Hanqing’s play. ence that she has been waiting impatiently for gates are opened to welcome ghosts, who seek revenge. In the moment that her father declines food and entertainment, causing mischief and A model for global theatre, her case, she enters to demand justice and a even malevolence. Roaming spirits come in two this project also activates promise of protection for Cai. While Dou E’s filial types: those who are cared for, with descendants

52 ikin yum © rsc yum ikin collaboration at the local level by bringing to the RSC new and diverse artists and audiences. The project is committed to commissioning playwrights of Chinese descent from the UK and around the world, like Cowhig, and forging connec- tions between the RSC and UK-based theatremakers of East Asian heritage. Besides the proposed four productions pro- duced by the RSC and 10 newly commissioned translations, the Katie Leung as Dou Yi and Colin Ryan as Handsome Zhang in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2017 production of Snow initiative will also create a digi- in Midsummer. tal archive, with a goal toward who burn paper offerings at temples, and those in Midsummer offers us a view into this rapidly publication, making the transla- who are not, hungry ghosts with no living changing contemporary China and the effects descendants. There are a number of superstitions of global capitalism through the lens of classical tions available to a wider public to ensure that one does not catch the attention drama to bring the natural and human into focus. readership and accessible for of hungry ghosts. People delay starting business- development by other . es, buying property, having surgeries or getting Pollution married during ghost month. On the final day Snow in Midsummer is set in the fictional New The Chinese Translations of the month, lanterns are released over water Harmony, a factory town—the very backbone Project is just one part of a to guide spirits back to their realm. The now- of China’s economic rise—that is suffering from larger initiative promoting closed temple gates represent the physical barrier environmental disaster. Just as the speed and between the living and the dead. scale of China’s rapid rise to become a global international cultural, artistic economic power is unprecedented, so too is the and educational cross-exchange scope and severity of China’s pollution problem. with China. The Shakespeare Old and New China Much of China’s economic growth derives from both urbanization and industrial growth from Folio Project is a decade-long The rise of China is shaping up to be one of the coal, and each has had major environmental translation project dedicated to greatest of the 21st century. Today, the consequences. China holds the top position in producing new Chinese transla- U.S. and China are neck and neck in a race for world carbon emissions. The air quality of major global power. Who will be the number-one eco- cities consistently fails to meet international tions of Shakespeare’s plays nomic superpower on the world stage? From standards, such that life expectancy north of the for performance. The Chinese barely a statistical rounding error in 1978, with Huai River, located midway between the Yellow Translations Project and the less than 1 percent of global trade to its name, and Yangtze Rivers, is 5.5 years lower than in the China is now one of the world’s leading econo- south because of air pollution. In December 2015, Shakespeare Folio Project will mies. China’s economic ascendance has reverber- the Asian Development Bank approved a $300 culminate in 2023, the 400th ated across the world and radically transformed million loan to address the smog problem in and anniversary of the publication the country. The environmental, social and cul- around Beijing, home to more than 100 million tural impact of these changes has set “old” China people. Another major problem is the lack of of the First Folio. on a collision course with “new” China. Snow water; almost two-thirds of China’s roughly 660

53 Snow in Midsummer ikin ikin yum © rsc frances ya-chu cowhig

Playwright Frances Ya-Chu ing America the nickname of “Gold Mountain,” Cowhig was born in Philadel- but also a series of natural disasters such as droughts, storms, earthquakes, floods, plagues phia and raised in Northern and famines that struck southern China in the Virginia, Okinawa, Taipei and early 19th century, first prompting people to Beijing. She draws on her migrate from rural areas to the city, and then to the United States and across the globe. peripatetic childhood to craft theatrical worlds that reveal Organ transplant connections between people, Another issue that is caught between traditional and modern China, which Snow in Midsummer places, events and encounters, asks us to attend to, is the ethics around organ exposing the ties that bind the harvesting and transplant. The debate over local with the global. China’s use of executed prisoners’ organs for transplant was literally laid bare in the traveling Produced nationally and art exhibition of preserved and dissected human internationally and garnering bodies, Body Worlds, when it was revealed that numerous awards, her works some of the bodies and parts acquired for the exhibit were from executed Chinese prisoners. possess a depth and ethics The debate around organ harvesting and trans- Katie Leung as Dou Yi in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2017 rare among playwrights of her production of Snow in Midsummer. plant that this practice provoked underscores generation. With each play, she questions about ethics, human rights and an cities suffer from water shortages. The blatant unsavory market that makes the sale of human provides an unflinching look costs to land and people have prompted a num- organs and matter so profitable. China’s reliance at the consequences of human ber of policy changes; efforts to curb air pollution on executed prisoners for organ donation is not actions and an abiding interest have resulted in the decline in coal consumption only political—whereby the state has complete and a fall in emissions in 2015—the first time in control over condemned people’s lives—but in power and politics. Her plays, 15 years. In 2017, China recommitted to the Paris also cultural. Confucianism and Buddhism have while steeped in sorrow and Climate Agreement with pledges on decreasing shaped and inflected cultural values, persevering loss, are equally invested in re- carbon dioxide emissions, implementing non- today even though the practice of religion was fossil fuels and active reforestation, to be prohibited during the Cultural Revolution in the covery and reparation, whether achieved by 2030. 1960s and 1970s. With organ donation and trans- she is writing about the legacy China’s environmental woes are not only the plant, these older mores rub uncomfortably of Guantánamo Bay in Lidless product of modern China, but also stem from an up against a modern, and increasingly global, inherited history of attitudes about human medical system. or the cost of the American sovereignty and nature. From emperors to Filial piety, a key principle of Confucianism, is dream exported by Chinese Chairman Mao, China’s institutional role in pro- one of the primary impediments to organ dona- translations of popular self-help tecting the environment, according to Elizabeth tion. The focus on intergenerational duty instructs Economy in The River Runs Black: Environmental children to obey their parents, serve them diligent- books in The World of Extreme Challenge to China’s Future, was “strictly person- ly, bury them whole and intact and worship them Happiness, which, like Snow in al,” with the moral responsibility for protection afterward. These tight familial ties also make the Midsummer, is set in a factory resting in the hands of the national leader and donation of one’s body parts to a stranger seem regional administrators. Thus, it was highly idio- anathema. Even though there are not explicit town in China. In an interview syncratic and dependent upon inclined individu- injunctions against organ donation—and the life- with American Theatre maga- als in higher office. The general populace, writes saving power and compassion that organ donation zine, speaking about The World Economy, “played virtually no role as advocate.” provides is valued highly by both Confucianism Instead, they were at the mercy of their leaders and Buddhism—the cultural and spiritual pressure of Extreme Happiness, Cowhig and Mother Nature. Indeed, the earliest migra- to preserve the integrity of the dead persists. says, “what I’m really interested tions from China to the United States were not in is complicating every side of only prompted by the California Gold Rush, earn-

54 Girlhood among ghosts the story—telling a story that is China is haunted by the customs and practices of very much about all the things the past. Playwright Cowhig has witnessed these changes firsthand and provides a window into we’re seeing in the headlines the ongoing shifts and tensions. In an interview but telling it through the lens and profile in Tank Magazine, Cowhig pinpoints of trauma and recovery, through her interest in writing plays about China to her own background: “I lived in China from 1996 to the efforts of multiple genera- 2001 (age 13 to 18), and Taiwan from 1994 to 1996. tions of people who are trying My mother is from rural Taiwan; her parents were to construct meaningful lives.” both farmers and her brothers are all business- men, some of whom work in China. And my The World of Extreme Hap- father is a U.S. diplomat who worked in China. So piness is the first of a trilogy of honestly, it’s just the stuff I grew up surrounded plays that explore the conse- by, ideas and people I was exposed to over a life- quences of global capitalism time of going back and forth between Asia and Playwright Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig the U.S.” on marginalized people and The Chinese/American experience of going Further Reading/Listening communities. While Cowhig back and forth that Cowhig experienced builds on generations of work by Asian American play- • Giovanni Arrighi. Adam Smith in Beijing: returns to the contemporary wrights, poets and novelists. One of the most Lineages of the Twenty-first Century. Chinese factory town in Snow in famous American writers of Chinese descent, Contextualizes China’s emergence as a global, Midsummer, the second play in Maxine Hong Kingston, titled her critically political, and economic power in a reading of acclaimed autobiographical novel The Woman Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. the trilogy, she juxtaposes Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. not only the historical with the Kingston’s protagonist must navigate between • Lei Liang, Yuan. A saxophone quartet based contemporary, adapting the two worlds: the America to which her parents on a passage in Guan Hanqing’s play that fol- have emigrated, a place full of white “ghosts,” lows the intonations and lyrical contours of the 13th-century play to the China and the China of her mother’s stories, a place Chinese text. Listen to Lei Liang, Milou, or: https:// of today, but the mythological haunted by ghosts of the past who have been soundcloud.com/prism-quartet/yuan-by-lei-laing with the ecological: “It seems silenced. For Snow in Midsummer, Cowhig asks her audience also to move through two worlds, • Pu Songling, Strange Tales from a Chinese to me like the most important contemporary China and classical China, both Studio: Eerie and Fantastic Chinese Stories of the story of our time—the impact of which are rife with ghosts. In the same Tank Supernatural. A collection of supernatural folk- of global capitalism on vulner- profile, Cowhig explains that “because Chinese tales, compiled in the 18th century during the writers who try to write about social or political Qing Dynasty by a failed scholar. able populations/ecologies.” truths are often punished by the government, Cowhig received an MFA because there aren’t many plays about con- • Liao Yiwu. The Corpse Walker. A chronicle of in Writing from the James A. temporary China, and because there aren’t very the generation and class left behind in the race meaty roles for Asian actors in the U.S. or for a new China, based on interviews conducted Michener Center for Writers at the UK, by writing a few plays on China I can over 11 years. Liao Yiwu is the subject and inspira- University of Texas, Austin, address multiple ‘gaps’ at once.” Such reflection tion for Cowhig’s play Go On Living. and a certificate in ensemble- on “old” and “new,” as well as the possibilities for bridging these divides, is integral to Cowhig’s • Judith T. Zeitlin. The Phantom Heroine: based physical theatre from the commitment to writing about China outside of Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Dell’Arte International School of the country, as a member of the diaspora. She Chinese Literature. Rich overview of the literary Physical Theatre. She is head of provides a window into a rapidly changing world and cultural roots of the Chinese ghost tradition where the space between here and there, the U.S. that calls attention to the centrality of the repre- the playwriting concentration at and China, overlaps. sentation of female ghosts. the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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