Stirring the elements
The ART's adaptation of a 13th century Chinese story, 'Snow in June' is a dazzling mix of East, West
CAMBRIDGE -- Combine Chinese opera, "The Good Person of Setzuan," "Kill Bill," "The Beverly Hillbillies,""Hairspray," American roots music, Tai Chi, and the blizzard of '78 and you have a good idea what the latest production at the American Repertory Theatre is all about.
Adapted by auteur director Chen Shi-Zheng from a 13th-century Chinese story with text by contemporary playwright Charles L. Mee, "Snow in June" is an often inspired, sometimes dazzling combination of all these elements. For at least half of its 90 minutes, though, the result feels more like melange than synthesis.
Shi-Zheng has purposefully mixed Eastern and Western ingredients, even if the purpose isn't entirely clear. The Loeb Drama Center stage is covered in shredded plastic snow and the actors are as playful as puppies after a few inches have fallen in a field.
The Chinese-born director himself is nothing if not playful. An enormous Plexi-
glas billboard features colorful images of fish and flowers. The costumes range from plaid pants and working-class T-shirts to bared midriffs and a giant plastic purse. Shi-Zheng has said that he likes to use kitsch because the story of an innocent woman whose ghost avenges her unjust execution is so depressing. But for too much of the play the humor undercuts the story's power rather than complements it. That in itself may be purposeful, as Shi-Zheng utilizes other Brechtian distancing devices like an open backstage to prevent over-emotional identification with the heroine/victim.
Instead our attention is focused on the whimsicality of the storytelling, which has its positives as well as its negatives. David Patrick Kelly, as talented an avant-garde actor as there is, amusingly inhabits -- move over, Harvey Fierstein -- the heroine's mother. You can hear both Southern and Asian accents in his diction and his singing.
Qian Yi as the heroine beautifully simulates a ghostly glide through the snow in the prologue, which establishes that she had been executed "out of cruel intent" thanks to a loutish father and son. The play goes back in time to show how, finally demonstrating what happens when she gets her revenge.
Holding it all together is Paul Dresher's excellent score, ably performed by the local group Andromeda. Dresher is every bit as eclectic as Shi-Zheng. You can hear Flatt & Scruggs, Astor Piazzolla, Talking Heads, and Asian music, but Dresher is putting things together rather than throwing them in the air. His music not only takes the story forward, it maintains a satiric but serious sensibility from one song to another. And Qian Yi's forceful solo finale, the only song in Chinese, casts just the right spell.
Dresher's music has the kind of coherence often missing in Shi-Zheng's adaptation. For example, Mee has the characters intone at the beginning, "Nobody I know gets out of bed in the morning and says: Now today, I am going to do something bad. No. The worst a person might say sometimes is: Today, I may have to choose the lesser of two evils." You would expect, then, that "Snow in June" is going to have a certain moral relativism to the story, but it doesn't. The characters are either all good, all bad, or in The Mother's case, all befuddled.
Shi-Zheng, perhaps best-known for the three-day opera, "The Peony Pavilion," is the kind of anti-naturalistic showman who has brought a distinctive glow to ART productions the past two years. This has usually meant wholesale importation of cast and crew. Yi Li Ming is responsible for the wonderland of snow, and Rick Fisher's lighting brings out the eeriness of Mee's rhythmic text.
Thomas Derrah is the only member of the regular company onstage, but Shi-Zheng lets him overplay the part of the dastardly dimwit. The ART/MXAT Institute actors acquit themselves well as the chorus, whether perfoming household chores or Tai Chi exercises. When they duel, white illuminated broomsticks double as martial arts weaponry.
In the end, fortunately, Shi-Zheng and "Snow in June" do make a strong statement as the heroine's curses come to fruition. In the Mee and Shi-Zheng version, this is not so much a biblical case of divine retribution or Stephen King revenge story. There is a price that the planet pays for the wrongs that happen on Earth. There are countless political and ecological metaphors one can think of.
Like Kama Ginkas's adaptation of "Lady with a Lapdog" earlier in the season, it takes "Snow in June" too long to overcome its buffoonery and get to the point. But once it does, particularly after Qian Yi's beautiful and frightening aria, there's reason to celebrate this snowfall.
("Snow in June"; Produced by the American Repertory Theatre; At the Loeb Drama Center, through Dec. 28. 617-547-8300.)
Ed Siegel can be reached at siegel@globe.com.
