If you knew nothing about Snow in Midsummer when you walked into the Classic Stage Company theater — not having read the press release earlier, I didn’t know a thing — it’s a fair bet only a few minutes would pass before you’d suspect that Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s play is based on a long-revered Chinese myth or legend.
It is. Turns out the two-acter is adapted from The Injustice to Dou Yi That Moved Heaven and Earth. The prolific Guan Hanqing (1210-1298) authored the work during the Yuan dynasty, when it couldn’t be more obvious that corruption and injustice were no less omnipresent than they are today. Whether the Chinese master was writing from an actual series of 13th-century events isn’t clear to me, which in 2022 is neither here nor there.
Certainly, the timelessness — and therefore timeliness — of the ancient work is what has drawn playwright Cowhig to material already presented at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2017 and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2018.
Be advised that merely updating the piece is not what gives Snow in Midsummer the undeniable air of myth, of legend. The venerable tale might have been updated in any old way. The tip-off is that Cowhig, director Zi Alikhan, and movement director Sunny Min-Sook Hitt have gussied up the dark story to the point of hysteria. Perhaps they’ve been imagining that the heaven-and-earth shaking-and-shuddering unleashed on Dou Yi is how it would have been presented to spectators 800-years-and-change back.
Maybe they’re right. Maybe they know something. Maybe they haven’t considered that audiences today could be divided into those who’ll go with it and those who’ll respond to the onstage excesses as titter-provoking. As for me, I only know that Yuan dynasty dramas were termed Yuan Zaju and usually incorporated music. How they were directed beats me. Were they directed?
Whatever, Cowhig and Alikhan initially set Snow in Midsummer as more convoluted than seems necessary. As it begins, an older man sings to himself at a desk (set design by “dots”), while various players walk along the edges of the raised playing area. Who is this self-satisfied man? Who are some of the others that don’t appear to have anything to do with him? What’s meant by the mention somewhere of “ghost month”? Oh, I get it. It signals that this is a ghost play
So, patience is required and is paid off as circumstances slowly come into focus — but not without much of the attendant hysteria hocus-pocus. The older man is Master Zhang (Kenneth Lee), who owns a factory in the troubled town of Harmony (note the irony). He comes to a bad end. his demise attributed to the clearly innocent Dou Yi (Dorcas Leung) of the Guan Hanqing title.
She’s quickly executed, whereupon her heart is transplanted by shady Dr. Lu (Lee again) into the chest of young, partially bleach-blond Rocket (Tommy Bo). Rocket is the boyfriend of Master Zhang’s tall, skinny son, Handsome Zhang (John Yi), who’s constantly watched over by Mother Cai (Wai Ching Ho), a woman with her own sinister motives.
(Interruption for a query: Would Guan Hanqing have included a gay relationship, or is Cowhig introducing a contemporary element handy for Gay Pride Month?)
Though Dou Yi is dead, she’s also undead, often crawling painfully across the stage in a ghostly-white dress Johanna Pan designed. She’s in search of her heart, a problem Rocket must endure by way of occasional chest tightening. Also wandering around is Tianyun (Teresa Avia Lim), the new owner of deceased Master Zhang’s factory. She’s accompanied by young daughter Fei-Fei (Fin Moulding), while also in search of an older daughter done wrong. That daughter just so happens to be….
Okay, enough of this. If you’ve been following the Mobius-strip plot that eventually all ties together, congrats, but no more details will be offered. It’s enough to report that Hanqing and Cowhig adhere to playwrighting outcomes of which Shakespeare would have approved: The unjust will be exposed so that justice can again prevail — but not before a few bodies litter the place.
With Jeanette Ol-Suk Yew’s lights going like blazes and Fan Zhang’s sound and original music charging the air, the actors make a show of giving 110% of what they’ve got, when perhaps only 100% would suffice. Leung is the foremost thespian, sometimes scraping along the ground, sometimes climbing atop a frequently repositioned table to excoriate her woe-begotten times. She even gives a plea for children that right now has an Uvalde ring to it.
Among the ensemble others, there’s not a single slouch. As ill-starred boyfriends, Yi and Bo let loose whenever asked. Lee, playing even a third character, finds three ways to be demonic. Lim as baffled new owner Tianyun is clever at suggesting she has an interest in something more than running an already troubled factory. Moulding’s Fei-Fei has charm, though she sometimes speaks too low. Ho, also doubling as a sage healer, snappily conveys disturbed gumption.
Cowhig is surely echoing Guan Hanqing with grim utterances like “nobody’s innocent” and “everyone’s tortured,” but it’s possible the explanation for midsummer snow is her insertion. Though a more meaningful explanation is made explicit in the test, one character here facilely attributes the out-of-season snowfall to “climate change.” Could that possibly have been a major Guan Hanqing concern?
Snow in Midsummer opened June 8, 2022, at the Classic Stage Company and runs through July 9. Tickets and information: classicstage.org
