In 2006, Canadian playwright David Yee typed a furious e-mail to leaders of Parliament regarding its refusal to acknowledge past discriminatory issues facing Chinese-Canadian communities. When it came to the crucial moment, however, he decided not to click “send.”
Instead, Yee channeled his anger: first into the development of a character and, eventually, a noir-inspired play that uncovers buried wounds associated with racist acts, including the Exclusion Act and head taxes once directed toward Chinese-Canadians.
This weekend, Duke Players Lab Theater will present Yee’s work, Lady in the Red Dress, at Brody Theater. The play, directed by junior Theater Studies major Alyssa Wong and performed by a seven-member cast, revolves around Max, a white lawyer reluctantly responsible for organizing and determining the compensations for the contemporary Chinese-Canadian community.
Although Yee presents the discrimination toward Chinese-Canadians as prevalent and timely in the play’s context, the cast had to take a step back in order to fully immerse themselves in the conflict of Yee’s play and produce an honest performance.
“Racism against Asian people is still a little murky because it’s just not that apparent, so that was an issue that was lingering that we had to come to terms with,” said senior actor Wanda Jin.
Max, played by senior David Rothschild, tries to resist helping the Chinese-Canadian community, only to be flung into time-traveling mayhem with the resentful ghost Sylvia, played by Jin. Sylvia, through a series of life-threatening episodes, shows Max the lives affected by the racist acts.
“I don’t want to call it horror, because it’s not exactly scary,” actor Sam Kebede, sophomore, said. “I would call it more darkly comedic action.”
Last October, Yee visited Duke through an invitation by Sean Metzger, an assistant professor of English and Theater Studies and now the play’s advisor. Metzger asked Wong to prepare a stage reading for the first third of Lady in the Red Dress in addition to parts from Yee’s Paper Series, a collection of five short stories and plays about paper.
“I had already read the play in Sean’s class and really liked it,” Wong said. “I’ve workshopped scenes of this before. I’ve essentially been preparing for this since this past summer, in terms of design and research.”
Duke Players Lab Theater, which hosts plays in both the fall and spring, sends out an e-mail seeking aspiring directors. Interested students are required to assemble a petition consisting of what play they wish to direct and a plan describing how it will be accomplished. The plans are presented to the Duke Players council, which votes on which plays will be brought to production.
“We got reception from several people and the person with the strongest resources and best backing for the play was Alyssa,” Kebede (who is also the secretary of the Duke Players council) said. “She was really on her game. She had met Yee and already worked out the symbols.”
Although Yee will be unable to attend the play this weekend due to his prior responsibilities as a playwright-in-residence, he has assisted Wong in terms of interpretation.
“I had questions for him about the text and his intentions for writing this play. He’s just generally been really supportive,” Wong said. “I’ve pretty much been doing artistic direction on my own.”
Because Yee originally wrote the work as a screenplay, the production team encountered multiple obstacle for stage direction.
“We’ve got 22 scenes in 15 different locations,” Wong said. “The scenes change from Chinatown to the downtown Toronto Department of Justice, scenes in the ’20s, ’40s, ’60s, scenes in the present.”
Because the play will take place in Brody Theater, the surrounding audience makes it difficult to construct multiple, changing sets. Most of transitions will be done with lighting.
Although the technically challenging play was born out of anger at long-standing xenophobia, Yee manages to integrate light-hearted humor.
“It’s very tongue-in-cheek. The issues are very serious, but it’s not deadweight or heavy-handed,” Wong said. “But it doesn’t offer an easy fix. It does demand attention that people remember.”
Lady in the Red Dress will run this Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 8 p.m. in Brody Theater.
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