For 35 years, the Shaw Festival had one central criterion for its programming: Any and all plays had to have been written during George Bernard Shaw’s lifetime.
This is not as confining as it sounds. Shaw, after all, was born in 1856 — when Abraham Lincoln was still an Illinois lawyer — and died a few months after Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” hit the comics pages in 1950.
Nonetheless, two of the festival’s nine productions this season fall well before that time 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 stretched from 1279 to 1368.
“To twin ‘Orphan’ with ‘Snow’ gives our audience the chance to see two very different approaches to legendary material,” said Tim Carroll, the Shaw Festival’s artistic director. “Both pieces, in very different ways, allow the past to smash its way into the modern world.”
At the center of this confluence is Nina Lee Aquino, one of the most significant figures in Canadian theater. 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 actress daughter, Eponine Lee, in both plays.
Given the staggered rollout of the two plays (“Orphan” opened in June, “Snow” in August), the family relocated to Niagara-on-the-Lake from Ottawa, where Aquino is the artistic director of English theater at the National Arts Center. One of her first concerns, she said, was finding an actor who could plausibly play the young girl at the center of “Snow” because labor laws in Canada make it prohibitively expensive to cast child performers.
A similar problem had surfaced 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 just one scene, Aquino said, “but based on what Eponine could handle in the first rehearsal, David changed the part from, like, one line to a full-blown scene.”
Over a decade later, she again cast Eponine, who would also take on the title role in “Orphan,” and let her put high school on hold. (“The Asian mom in me felt really insecure about it,” Aquino said.)
Carroll, who had followed Aquino’s work during her tenure at the Factory Theater in Toronto, said he was thrilled to have all three family members at Shaw. “I wouldn’t have the whole Lee family onstage just for the sentimental value,” he said, “and I know they would be appalled if I did. This is just a happy coincidence.” (Carroll’s history with the family also stretches 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 theater festival.)
As co-founders of Toronto’s long-running Asian Canadian theater company fu-GEN, Aquino and Richard Lee have been members of the Canadian theater scene for their daughter’s entire life, including “during the pandemic,” Eponine said, “when her office was also her bedroom.”
In addition to directing her daughter, Aquino has directed her husband numerous times. “Sure, we chat about the show, here or at home,” she said in a rehearsal room after the first “Snow” performance, flanked by Richard to her left and Eponine to her right. “I wear all my badges on my sleeve.” The only rule, she said, is that she takes care not to grumble about their castmates.
Eponine, for her part, finds it easier to establish boundaries once they leave home. “I never see her as a mom here,” she said. “As soon as I step through the doors, I’m here to work.”
For “Snow,” Aquino relied on Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s modern-day 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 fight design, as does the more traditionally staged “Orphan,” which is frequently described as “the Chinese ‘Hamlet.’”
The “traditional” concept is an admittedly complicated one for this period, according to Ariel Fox, a University of Chicago professor who specializes in pre-modern Chinese drama. Fox describes Yuan drama as “a strange genre to contemporary theatergoers.”
While a few dozen plays from this period have survived, these typically consist of only a group of arias sung by the lead character. Large collections of the complete plays weren’t published until more than 300 years later, and subsequent adaptations (by towering figures like Voltaire and contemporary theater makers like David Greenspan) largely stem from those collections.
“Much of what we call Yuan drama is not actually from the Yuan at all,” Fox said. “Many of these ‘original’ texts had already been rewritten to suit the morality and taste of later audiences.”
Both Shaw Festival productions have modern-day echoes of their own, from the more blatant sexting and vaping in “Snow” to the costumes in “Orphan” that could be worn by contemporary 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 traffic in 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 ‘Snow’ playwright told the marketing team here was, ‘Please, no Ching-Chong fonts and no Ching-Chong music.’”
Aquino has returned to Ottawa, where the family will reunite next month when the National Arts Center presents the Shaw production of “Snow.” The fall term at Eponine Lee’s high school will be in full swing by then, she said, so the plan was “to play it simple and head back to school in February.”
The National Arts Center appointed Aquino to her current role in 2022. It’s the most recent of many milestones for Aquino, who also edited the first Asian Canadian play anthology and organized the first Asian Canadian theater conference.
“My awareness of the fight stemmed as far back as university, when my professors told me about the wall we faced,” said Aquino, who wrote a paper in graduate school arguing 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, would seem to indicate a heartening new era for Asian Canadian theater. Aquino, who is also a co-dramaturg on “Salesman,” agrees. Sort of.
In 2006, she was part of the lone Canadian delegation at a convening of the first Asian American Theater Conference in Los Angeles. “If someone told us then that we would be here at Shaw now with two plays, I would say, ‘It took long enough.’ OK, yes, we should pat our own backs. But what took so long?”
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