2 Chinese Dramas (and a Family of 3) Broaden the Reach of a Theater Festival – DNyuz

For 35 years, the Shaw Festival has had one central criterion for its programming: all plays had to have been written during George Bernard Shaw’s lifetime.

This isn’t as reductive as it sounds. After all, Shaw was born in 1856 — when Abraham Lincoln was still a lawyer in Illinois — and died a few months after Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” hit the comics pages in 1950.

Nevertheless, two of the festival’s nine productions this season fall well before that period. “The Orphan of Chao” and “Snow in Midsummer” are adaptations of perhaps the two best-known plays from the Yuan period of classical Chinese drama, which ran from 1279 to 1368.

“Pairing ‘Orphan’ with ‘Snow’ gives our audiences the chance to see two very different approaches to legendary material,” said Tim Carroll, Shaw Festival Artistic Director. “Both pieces allow the past to find its way into the modern world in very different ways.”

At the heart of this confluence is Nina Lee Aquino, one of the most important figures in Canadian theatre. The festival not only enlisted Aquino to direct “Snow” (her debut there), but also cast her husband, Richard Lee, an actor and fight director, and their 17-year-old daughter, actress Eponine Lee, in both plays.

Given the phased rollout of the two plays (“Orphan” opened in June, “Snow” in August), the family relocated from Ottawa to Niagara-on-the-Lake, where Aquino is artistic director of the English Theatre at the National Arts Centre. One of her first concerns, she said, was finding an actor who could plausibly play the young girl at the center of “Snow,” since Canadian labor laws make it prohibitively expensive to cast child performers.

A similar problem arose in 2013, when Aquino cast a 6-year-old Eponine in a Toronto production of David Yee’s “Carried Away on the Crest of a Wave.” The young character had only one scene, Aquino said, “but based on what Eponine could handle in the first rehearsal, David changed the role from, say, one line to a full-fledged scene.”

More than a decade later, she recast Eponine, who would also play the title role in “Orphan,” and had her put her high school on hold. (“The Asian mom in me felt very insecure about it,” Aquino said.)

Carroll, who had followed Aquino’s work during her tenure at Toronto’s Factory Theatre, said he was thrilled to have all three family members at Shaw. “I wouldn’t have the whole Lee family on stage, just for sentimental reasons,” he said, “and I know they’d be shocked if I did. This is just a happy coincidence.” (Carroll’s history with the family also goes back to his very first Canadian production, when he cast Richard Lee as a Lost Boy in a 2010 “Peter Pan” at the Stratford Festival, Canada’s other major theatre festival.)

As co-founders of the Asian-Canadian theatre company fu-GEN in Toronto, Aquino and Richard Lee have been part of the Canadian theatre scene their entire lives, including “during the pandemic,” Eponine said, “when her office was also her bedroom.”

In addition to directing her daughter, Aquino has directed her husband on numerous occasions. “Of course, we chat about the show, here or at home,” she said in a rehearsal room after the first “Snow” performance, flanked by Richard on her left and Eponine on her right. “I wear all my badges on my sleeve.” The only rule, she said, is that she makes sure not to grumble about her castmates.

Eponine, for her part, finds it easier to set boundaries once they leave home. “I never see her as a mother here,” she said. “As soon as I walk through the door, I’m here to work.”

For “Snow,” Aquino relied on Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s modern adaptation of the Yuan melodrama “The Injustice to Dou E That Moved Heaven and Earth,” which uses the conventions of ghost stories to discuss both sexual and ecological exploitation. It also features Richard Lee’s battle design, as does the more traditionally staged “Orphan,” which is often described as “the Chinese ‘Hamlet.’”

The “traditional” concept is an admittedly complicated one for the period, according to Ariel Fox, a professor at the University of Chicago who specializes in premodern Chinese drama. Fox describes Yuan drama as “a foreign genre for contemporary theatergoers.”

Although several dozen plays from this period survive, they typically consist only of a group of arias sung by the main character. Major collections of the complete plays were not published until over 300 years later, and later adaptations (by towering figures like Voltaire and contemporary dramatists like David Greenspan) derive largely from those collections.

“Much of what we call Yuan drama doesn’t actually come from the Yuan at all,” Fox said. “Many of these ‘original’ texts had already been rewritten to suit the morals and tastes of later audiences.”

Both Shaw Festival productions have their own contemporary echoes, from the more blatant sexting and vaping in “Snow” to the costumes in “Orphan” that could be worn by modern-day pro-democracy protesters in China.

“I always say, ‘Forget traditional,’” Richard Lee said of his preferred approach to classical works.

Part of the concern is Western theater’s long history of using “tradition” as an excuse to trade on Asian stereotypes in shows like “The King and I” and “Miss Saigon.” Aquino said she and others have remained vigilant about such stereotypes: “The first thing the playwright of ‘Snow’ said to the marketing team here was, ‘Please, no Ching-Chong fonts and no Ching-Chong music.'”

Aquino has returned to Ottawa, where the family will be reunited next month when the National Arts Centre presents the Shaw production of “Snow.” The fall semester at Eponine Lee High School will be in full swing, she said, so the plan was “to keep it simple and go back to school in February.”

The National Arts Centre appointed Aquino to her current position in 2022. It is the latest of many milestones for Aquino, who also edited the first Asian Canadian play collection and organized the first Asian Canadian theatre conference.

“My awareness of the struggle stems from when I was in college, when my professors would tell me about the wall that we were facing,” said Aquino, who wrote a paper in college advocating for the creation of a space for Asian Canadian theater artists. “And I decided that if you can put yourself in a position of power, you can become the door to that wall.”

Shaw’s programming of “The Orphan of Chao” and “Snow in Midsummer,” as well as “Salesman in China” at this year’s Stratford Festival in Ontario, seem to point to an encouraging new era for Asian-Canadian theatre. Aquino, who is also a co-dramaturg on “Salesman,” agrees. Sort of.

In 2006, she was part of the only Canadian delegation to attend the first Asian American Theater Conference in Los Angeles. “If someone had told us then that we would be here at Shaw with two plays, I would have said, ‘It’s taken long enough.’ Okay, yes, we should pat ourselves on the back. But what took so long?”

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