Rocketry, printing and compass navigation, to be sure; but did you know the Chinese also invented Cinderella? Just one of many ethnographic factoids to be gleaned from Gateway Theatre’s new production of Marjorie Chan’s China Doll.
Makes perfect sense, when you think of it. It takes a culture with a 1,000-year tradition of foot-binding to imagine that a petite shoe size could propel a smudgy drudge into royal robes. That’s the premise on which Poa-poa (Manami Hara), the iron-willed matriarch of a down-at-the-heels gentry family, undertakes to bonsai the pedal phalanges of her female descendants.
In the play’s early 20th century setting, amidst the collapse of the imperial Ch’ing Dynasty and the tumultuous onset of the Chinese Republic, a daintily deformed foot was still enough of a social mobility vector to land Poa-poa’s daughter (Donna Soares) a well-born husband.
But he turns out to be a gambling wastrel whose opium addiction drives himself and his wife to penury and premature death. That leaves the old lady and her grand-daughter, Su-ling (Jennifer Tong) indentured in the sprawling courtyard compound of a many-wived feudal grandee.
Servants they may be, but at least genteel ones, empowered for such decorous tasks as shopping on the Master’s behalf with such upscale tradesmen as Merchant Li (Jovanni Sy), purveyor of fine silks and embroidery. That puts them a cut above such barely human menials as Ming (Soares, again, in a double role), an urchin hanger-on in the grandee’s courtyard.
And, Poa-poa ventures to hope, Su-ling could even someday lift herself and her grandmother out of abjection, as long as she binds her feet tight enough (starting at age five), maintains meekly mute decorum, practices her embroidery and steers clear of riff-raff like Ming.
This proves hard for Su-ling. Her foot bones are warping nicely, at least, with the attendant stilted gait. But she hates embroidery, and she can’t help but be drawn to Ming, her footloose and tart-tongued little contemporary who so blithely kicks shuttlecocks around their shared courtyard. What’s worse, Su-ling’s prone to blurt awkward questions – so much so that Merchant Li at first wants to bar her from his tony showroom.
He soon relents, though, and finds himself increasingly taken with the curious child as she grows up enough to run errands to the shop on her own. The silk merchant hardly shares Poa-poa’s nostalgia for the fallen Dynasty; he’s an uncritical fan of all the modernizing and Westernizing fads sweeping the incipient Republic. He clandestinely undertakes to teach Su-ling to read – a radical notion for girls at the time – and he furtively feeds her books.
He starts her on such juvenile fare as the fairy tale of Yuxian, the Chinese Cinderella, but eventually progresses to such incendiary tracts as the poetry of proto-feminist Qui Jin, who was beheaded in the waning days of the Dynasty. Meanwhile, though, the girl and the Merchant enact their own Chinese version of another familiar Western fairy tale: Rumpelstiltskin.
Torn between her expanding mental horizons and her filial piety towards her grandmother, Su-ling allows her social-climbing Poa-poa to Sherpa her into a stratospherically lofty marriage – no less a station than Second Wife (i.e. concubine) to her Master’s #2 Son.
No more hard scrabbling. Now the two women can eat and dress lavishly in luxurious harem quarters. They’re even assigned the hapless Ming as a personal maidservant. Only two catches: Su-ling must burn her secret stash of books to disguise her forbidden literacy. And she has to complete her bridal finery with her own hand-sewn micro-slippers in time for her fast-approaching nuptials – a task utterly beyond her crude needlework.
But not beyond the wizardry of Master Li. In a clandestine visit to his silk shop on the eve of her wedding day, she unwraps her stunted little hooflets for him to take their measure – a scene so fraught with erotic overtones that China Doll had to specially hire a trained “intimacy choreographer,” Lisa Goebel, to navigate it tastefully.
Overnight, Li delivers her a masterpiece of embroidery – an exquisite pair of “Golden Lotus” slippers – along with one last book, a hot-off-the-presses new Chinese translation of Henrik Ibsen’s feminist classic A Doll’s House, which (we learn from a Playbill essay) was all the rage in 1920’s Shanghai intellectual circles.
The Chinese word for “doll,” I learned from the Chinese surtitles accompanying the Gateway production, is wan ou (玩偶, literally “play idol”), which well befits the image of Su-ling as she stands, motionless and stone-faced on a footstool pedestal to be silk-swaddled and bejewelled for her bridegroom.
But then Ming shares some grisly detail about the Young #2 Master’s notions of “play,” as fatally visited upon the “idol” of his previous concubine. In an intersectional outburst of sisterly solidarity, the two girls collude to stage Su-ling’s getaway. Even Poa-poa, stranded and bereft, nevertheless gifts her cane to her granddaughter as Su-ling hobbles off on her freshly unbound (but permanently crippled) feet.
China Doll fits squarely within the quintessentially Chinese genre of didactic melodrama, a rapid-fire series of vignette scenes, often barely half a minute long, each posing its own little ethical conundrum. But, unlike the arch-villains and proletarian paragons of China’s Revolutionary Opera melodramas, Chan’s characters are credibly complex, giving her actors plenty to work with.
So Tong, in her professional acting debut, evolves, in the course of just two acts over 120 minutes, from a wide-eyed, clumsy toddler to a precocious teen to a traumatized sex object to an impassioned refusenik to a prematurely haggard refugee crone.
Soares doubles as the haunted mother and the feisty playmate. Hara humanizes Poa-Poa’s domestic tyranny with a shadowed history of privation. And Sy leavens his altruism with ironic wit, a smarmy mercantile venality and a touch of guilt-wracked kinkiness.
The 2004 script was the first of nine much-lauded plays and libretti by Chan, who is now artistic director of Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille. China Doll has been produced across Canada and in Hong Kong, but the Vancouver version is the first time Chan has directed it herself, so presumably the most faithful to her vision.
And a pretty lavish vision it is, judging from the high-end production values. Set designer Heipo Leung, lighting maven Chengyan Boon and the Chimerik (似不像) video collective collaborate for a staging that is eloquent, flexible, original and apt for the subject. It’s a thicket of retractable vertical columns bundled in taut, white, horizontal or diagonal bands.
You can construe them as architectural members, but they could also be seen as phalangeal bones strangled in crippling bandages. The matrix of flat and concave surfaces provides a mesmerizing screen for video projections of everything from scrolling texts to what looks like teeming corpuscles. Sidelights and overhead spots cast haunting shadows.
Sound designer Mishelle Cuttler’s understated score tags each character with characteristic musical motifs: brittle for Poa-poa, jazzy for Li, spunky for Ming, spooky for Ma-ma. As for Su-ling, her music evolves from childishly playful to pensive to shadowed, just as her wardrobe (by Amy McDougall) transits from little girl smocks to demure chi-pao’s to silken bridal regalia to beggarly weeds.