A NANKING WINTER
Written by Marjorie Chan
Directed by Ruth Madoc-Jones
Starring Grace Lynn Kung, Ella Chan and Stephen Russell
Produced by Nightwood Theatre at the Factory Theatre
**
While Theodor Adorno claimed that "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric," the philosopher neglected to voice an opinion about plays. And so, with everyone in a miserable mid-winter mood anyway, atrocity season has hit Toronto's theatres. Last week, the Armenian genocide was avenged in A Crooked Man, next week Holocaust survivor Rose will tell us her tale, and this week the rape of Nanking has stepped into the spotlight.
In a nanking winter, playwright Marjorie Chan, who wrote about foot-binding in her Dora Award-nominated debut China Doll, has turned her sights on the senseless slaughter that left an estimated 300,000 Chinese dead in Nanking after the 1937 Japanese invasion. She has chosen to approach this daunting subject from two sharply different dramatic angles, one that works and one that doesn't.
In the first act, we meet author Irene Wu (an overwrought Grace Lynn Kung), who has devoted the last five years of her life to writing a book about the massacre. Her long-term immersion in the worst of the Japanese Imperial Army's war crimes - bayoneted babies, burnt bodies clogging the Yangtze, systematic rape - has understandably left her a bit unhinged. It doesn't help matters that she has become the victim of a campaign of intimidation by crank-calling Japanese nationalists and that her husband Kurt's grandfather likely took part in the horrors she is exposing.
This is surely enough for Irene to deal with, but Chan gives her an additional and implausible headache to push her toward a breakdown. Enter editor Julia (Brooke Johnson), who has chosen the night before Irene's book hits the shelves to inform her that they've changed the title from The Nanking Holocaust to ... The Nanking Incident. Well, at least she brought a bottle of wine.
To deliver the news, Julia has also brought along lawyer Frank (Stephen Russell), a grossly insensitive, racist white man of the species often found in didactic drama but rarely in actual publishing-house legal departments. "It was their own [expletive]fault," this straw man soon says of the Chinese dead, and this is before the wine is even opened. Cue prolonged, screamed speeches dense with historical exposition, breathlessly staged by director Ruth Madoc-Jones; the title of a nanking winter is in lower case, but at this point you feel ALL CAPS would have been more appropriate.
Thankfully, things soon move from the present day to the tragedy in Nanking - a sentence I thought I would never have occasion to write and presumably not the reaction Chan was hoping for.
In this second part, the actors take on new roles: Frank and Julia become Nazi Niklas Hermann and nun Anna Mallery, fictionalized versions of real-life heroes John Rabe and Minnie Vautrin, whose efforts to create the Nanking Safety Zone saved thousands of Chinese lives. Irene becomes Little Mei, a tough-talking orphan who seeks refuge in their compound.
With this meatier material, the cast members give better performances. Ella Chan shines in both halves, bringing a much-needed lightness to Irene's bubbly sister Audrey in the first, and then weight to Big Mei, a pregnant woman who has witnessed the murder of her entire family, in the second.
Chan's recounting of the Chinese version of Hotel Rwanda run by Mallery is a bit paint-by-numbers, but as the history will not be overly familiar to most audiences, the simple straightforward account works well enough. It's the framing device of Irene and her book that scuttles the show. To quote the great dramaturge King Solomon, cut this baby in half and we'll have a play.
J. Kelly Nestruck