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The tears start to flow the moment Marjorie Chan begins talking about
the suicide of Iris Chang.
The late Chinese-American historian's 1997 book The Rape of Nanking:
The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II is the inspiration for Chan's
new play, Nanking Winter, which opens on Feb. 28 at Factory Theatre's
Mainspace. A co-production of Nightwood Theatre and Cahoots Theatre
Projects, it's directed by Ruth Madoc-Jones.
Chang's book documents the killing of 300,000 Chinese over a six-week
period in Nanjing – then known as Nanking – in 1937-38,
when the city was China's capital. It had been among the first books
to expose Japanese wartime atrocities. Seven years later, while researching
a documentary on U.S. military veterans who had suffered as prisoners
of war under the Japanese, Chang, just 37, pulled her car off the road
and shot herself – overwhelmed, it seems, by various emotional
trauma.
“I can't even talk about it,” Chan says, wiping away the
tears during a recent coffee chat in Starbucks. She had read Chang's
book in 1998 and seen her interviewed on television, but then more or
less forgot about it, until she heard about the suicide. That 2004 tragedy
rekindled her interest in the subject and she started work on the play. “I
don't know her, never met her, except through her books, but her loss
was enormous for everyone,” Chan says. “I was quite moved
by her. ”
Nanking Winter is actually two one-act plays linked by a common horror – the
wholesale rapes and killings committed by Japanese soldiers on the eve
of the Second World War. Unconventionally, the two acts move backward
in time. In the first, set in the present day, a character modelled
on Chang tries to come to terms with changes demanded by publishers
of her book about the event. In the second, we are transported back
to the actual events in Nanjing circa 1937.
“This structure was an issue for a lot of people,” Chan
concedes with a laugh. “But that's what felt right to me … that
we should discover these events as I discovered them, in the present
day. The questions the Chang character has are my questions, my issues – how
we view and treat history.”
Madoc-Jones, who is also Chan's dramaturge, has been involved virtually
from the beginning. “I trust her judgment, her humanity, her theatrical
skills, but I don't always agree.”
Chan, 33 – her name in Chinese is Chan Yee-Kwok – says
she has used the rehearsal process to hone the script. “I'm protective
of it. I'm true to my instincts, but I'm not precious,” she says. “And
when I see an actor act things instead of having to say it, I prefer
that. They do it much more eloquently. I'm happy to lose something when
the actor is more articulate in ways that words can't describe.”
In preparation, Chan read widely, not only about Nanjing, but about
the Jewish Holocaust of the Second World War, which claimed six million
lives, and the Rwandan holocaust of 1994, which claimed about 800,000.
“You can't begin to rank atrocities,” Chan says. “We
can only try to remember them all.”
The daughter of Chinese immigrants from Hong Kong who became provincial
civil servants, Chan was raised in Scarborough and was drawn to the
theatre world early. As teenagers, she and her older sister, Jennifer,
dressed up in costume to greet the opening night of Les Misérables.
Later, Chan studied acting at George Brown College and for years made
her living as an itinerant performer.
But after four to five years “of only expressing someone else's
artistic vision, taking that on my body eight shows a week for weeks
at a time,” she wanted to express her own. And she felt like she
was getting too many ingenue-type parts when, in fact, “I'm really
more of a [trouble-maker] at heart.”
She wrote her first play, China Doll, about the culture of foot-binding
of girls. It was nominated for two Dora Awards, as well as for a Governor-General's
Literary Award. Since then, she has produced librettos for the company
Tapestry: among them a new family opera called Sanctuary Song, about
an elephant in captivity, that is being mounted in June, with music
by Abigail Richardson. Chan has also scripted an adaptation of a play
about Hiroshima with actor Damien Atkins.
Now, in addition to writing, she is associate artistic director of
Cahoots Theatre Projects, working principally in outreach programs for
immigrant youth. Such workshop activities, she believes, are not only
critical to bringing new arrivals into the broader context of urban
and national culture, but can help to develop a younger, more multicultural
audience for theatre – a subject of concern to many established
companies. “We try to give them a sense of community, not necessarily
train them as stage artists. Because once they feel welcome, then they
can experience art. It's very difficult to experience art from a defensive
place.”
Chan says she wants to continue to work in various theatrical media;
she argues that if an artist's work is inspired only by that of her
friends and close colleagues, “it becomes a photocopy of a photocopy
and you get theatre that's not interesting any more.”
Given the demographic realities of contemporary Canada, the multiracial
mix of populations, “it's important for us to find inspiration
elsewhere, and find fresh approaches, ideas and stories,” Chan
says. “Or else our stories – and our audience – will
run out.”
Nanking Winter runs from Feb. 28 to March 16 at Factory Theatre, 125
Bathurst St. 416-504-9971.
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