Set in northern China just before the Maoist revolution, Chay Yew’s A Winter People is a stirring portrait of a family grappling with significant change. Jointly based on Chekhov’s Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, Yew’s “liberal adaptation” juxtaposes progress and tradition in addressing a handful of time-honored themes that define the human condition: love, loss, family, friends, hopes, dreams, power, and oppression. 

Madame Xia and her clan return to their beloved estate after visiting America. It is spring and the grounds are adorned with méhuā blossoms and an air of possibility. The dramatic tension increases through summer as the family struggles to pay the mortgage on their estate, thereby causing a former “peasant boy” turned business man to purchase the land, before razing and transforming it into a housing development. “The only thing good about your garden is its size,” the capitalistically minded Liao retorts to Madam Xia after she extolls the history of their “beautiful garden,” a moment that echoes Chekhov’s Lopakhin and Ranevskaya as the former proceeds to “chop down” the orchard. 

Keeping with The Acting Programme’s commitment to balancing Asian and Western pedagogies and content, we proudly present this Singaporean adaption of a Russian classic. Yew wrote A Winter People for the Toy Factory and the Singapore Arts Festival in 2002. We are grateful for his permission to restage it at LASALLE at a time when tradition and progress are clashing both in our city state and greater Asia. It is no mystery that Yew set his play in the years presaging China’s Communist Revolution and subsequent formation of the PRC. Mao would ultimately be swept into power and rule with forward-looking authoritarianism that reached its apex during the cultural revolution of the 1960s and continues today under Xi Jingping’s master plan. Ensnared in the matrix of such political powerbroking are ordinary citizens such as those in A Winter People, all of whom struggle to adjust and survive in a society faintly resembling what it once was.

The Taming of the Shrew (Director’s Note)

WAAPA 2019

Dr. Peter Zazzali

Performed in the early-1590s, The Taming of the Shrew reflected Early Modern England’s subjugation of women at the hands of their male counterparts. Despite the irony that a queen ruled supreme at the time, Britain was a decidedly patriarchal society in which women did not have the right to own land, receive a university education, or pursue a livelihood. Indeed, their life choices were essentially reduced to finding a husband or “getting [themselves] to a nunnery” as it were. With respect to the former and more common option, Shakespeare’s shrewish heroine Kate is desperate to find a mate to whom she can “love, serve, and obey.” The problem of course is that no one in Padua wants to betroth her on the grounds that she has been objectified as a “fiend,” a “monster,” and the “devil’s dam.”

George Bernhard Shaw famously called the play, “a vile insult to womanhood and manhood from the first word to the last.” Although never a fan of Shakespeare, his point is nevertheless apt, especially for contemporary audiences of the #MeToo era. It would be as erroneous as it would be irresponsible to straightforwardly present The Shrew without addressing its gender politics. Both the Kate/Petruchio and Suitors/Bianca plotlines deny women agency and locate them as property. The former narrative rewards a hero who literally beats and psychologically tortures his counterpart into marrying him (ostensibly for his financial gain), before “taming” her into abject submission, the culmination of which occurs during “the speech” with Kate quite literally scripted to bow beneath “her lord, her king, her governor.”

Despite the play’s misogyny, Shakespeare offers us clues for rethinking the Kate/Petruchio relationship. First, it is important to note that the two are genuinely attracted to each other, physically as well as intellectually, and theirs is a partnership of shared respect—perhaps even love. They clearly engage in a “game” of lust and mischievousness that extends beyond the boundaries of social acceptance. They are equally outlandish, fiercely independent, and downright lonely. In fact, they need each other.

While the play’s spousal abuse is unmistakable, we have chosen to problematize this trait through a liberal—if not deconstructed¾interpretation that relocates Katherine and Petruchio as lovers, partners, gamesters, and yes, equals. Moreover, by restoring its play-within-a-play framework, marked by the Christopher Sly sequence (The Induction), we offer a world of Commedia Dell Arte-inspired hijinks lending to the plot’s farcical essence, thereby softening its violent and cruel underpinnings. As such, we invite you to enjoy a “Shrew” that is respected if repositioned for the modern age.

Concept Images

Love & Information

Director’s Note

Dr. Peter Zazzali

Written in 2012, Love and Information is arguably Caryl Churchill’s most human if deliberately obtuse work. It poses more questions than provides answers. With respect to the title’s latter criterion, humans are informed in myriad ways: the multiple manifestations of digital technology and spoken language are perhaps the most obvious, but as the play suggests, semaphore, sign language, bird calls, dance, and even “sex” are also conduits for knowledge/data exchange. The other titular theme, love, is harder to identify. While a dictionary yields predictable definitions and synonyms ranging from “affection” and “adoration” to “idolization” and “devotion,” one might argue that love also applies to the very act of “being present” in one’s daily experience, thereby “loving”—if you will¾one’s multifaceted surroundings and relationships therein, which can include caring for the environment, each other, and the creatures with whom we share this amazing planet. 

Unfolding like a piece of chamber music, Love and Information consists of 43 independent vignettes contextualized by 7 movements over the course of 69 minutes. Woven as a puzzling tapestry, these mini-stories each represent the costs and benefits of an “information age” marked by Twitter, Facebook, and Big Data. While information may afford us immediate gratification and sociocultural influence, its pursuit oftentimes comes at the expense of our imaginations, our empathy, our souls, and yes, our ability to practice “love.” The play thus unwraps as a pointillistic critique of how we navigate survival in the digital age¾each vignette is a brush stroke, a dab on the canvas, a snapshot constituting Churchill’s tapestry of humanity in the modern world. Its form and function reciprocally integrate to offer a fragmented structure that theatrically echoes our ever-decreasing attention spans and commensurate disconnection from ourselves, each other, and the present moment. Thus, the play’s titular themes¾love and information¾are a dialectic representing an age in which progress and regression are contradictory bedfellows, with the future of the human condition very much at stake.  As such, again, it poses more questions than answers.      

Love and Information Review