The cast of Snow in Midsummer at perform a rain dance with the Chinese dragon in a scene at the Shaw Festival.David Cooper/Shaw Festival
- Title: Snow in Midsummer
- Written by: Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig
- Director: Nina Lee Aquino
- Actors: Donna Soares, Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster, Jonathan Tan, Michael Man
- Company: Shaw Festival
- Venue: Jackie Maxwell Studio Theatre
- City: Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.
- Year: Runs to Oct. 5, 2024
Critic’s Pick
The spookiest mystery with the most surprising twists at the Shaw Festival this season isn’t the one written by Agatha Christie or the latest Sherlock Holmes saga.
No, it’s Snow in Midsummer, American playwright Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s 2017 poetic and gripping play that is part detective story, part ghost tale, part dystopian drama.
It also happens to be an adaptation of a 13th century classic called The Injustice to Dou E that Moved Heaven and Earth by Guan Hanqing, sometimes known, anachronistically, as “China’s Shakespeare.” (Surely, if the comparison is worth making, William Shakespeare would be England’s Guan.)
Snow in Midsummer takes place in a kind of fantasy present in a Chinese company town called New Harmony experiencing extreme drought.
Tianyun Lin (Donna Soares), a former factory worker who pulled herself up by her bootstraps to become a powerful businesswoman, is in the process of purchasing the local factory, which makes plastic flowers.
The seller is Handsome Zhang (Michael Man), who wants to use the money to travel the world with his fiancé, Rocket Wu (Jonathan Tan), who recently underwent a heart transplant. The two plan to settle down and have a family somewhere else, somewhere less dried out, perhaps Vancouver.
The kink in all these plans is the weather havoc that New Harmony has been going through since a local woman named Dou Yi (a compelling Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster) was executed for killing Handsome’s father, former factory owner Master Zhang (John Ng).
As she was about to be killed by firing squad three years earlier, Dou Yi professed her innocence – and pledged that, though it was summer, snow would cover her corpse and then rain would not fall until her reputation was redeemed.
Eponine Lee as Fei-Fei, centre, Donna Soares as Tianyun, centre-rear, and Lindsay Wu, right, appear in a scene from Snow in Midsummer. The play is an adaptation of a 13th century classic called The Injustice to Dou E that Moved Heaven and Earth by Guan Hanqing.David Cooper/Shaw Festival
After her daughter Fai Fai (Eponine Lee) is suddenly possessed by Dou Yi’s ghost, Tianyun finds herself an unwitting detective investigating who really killed Master Zhang – and then the supernatural climate change gets so severe that New Harmony is given evacuation orders.
Snow in Midsummer might be have seemed more sci-fi and futuristic when it premiered at the Royal Shakespeare Company in England in 2017 – but coming after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and at the end of another summer of floods and forest fires that has causes the residents of Canadian towns and neighbourhoods to flee, it feels very much present tense.
Designer Joanna Yu’s costumes – from haute-couture hazmat suits to, in flashbacks to three years earlier, face masks – are simply in sync with the plague fashion of our own times. What injustices do we, the audience, need to right before it is too late?
Among contemporary plays grappling with the climate crisis, Cowhig’s is commendable in that it has a long view on the world – no doubt stemming from the fact that it is an adaptation of one nearly eight centuries old. There’s a recurring theme in the writing about what comes after – after death, after climate change, after apocalypse, after any kind of transformation that is irreversible, which, in truth, all transformations are.
Migration and transplantation find strong dramatic metaphor in the love story between Handsome and Rocket – a couple of roles that seem as if they were written for Shaw company members Man and Tan, who make a lovely on-stage couple.
It’s a fine ensemble all around with notable quirky contributions from Manami Hari, Kelly Wong, Travis Seetoo and Lindsay Wu also standing out in memorable secondary roles.
Nina Lee Aquino, current artistic director of the National Arts Centre’s English Theatre, was the perfect choice of director for this play. She has a long history of helming sci-fi-inflected plays interested in the past and future as much as the present – such as her frequent collaborations with Siminovitch prize winner David Yee. She first came to prominence directing Leon Aureus’s adaptation at of Terry Woo’s 2000 novel Banana Boys, a time-travelling tale.
Along with the always-creative designer Camellia Koo, Aquino has crafted a production that is both simple and clear – and full of theatrical surprises. I won’t soon forget the rain dance with the Chinese dragon or the offerings made to the dead that, once burned, magically reappear in the on-stage afterlife.
Snow in Midsummer builds its emotional power, too; I won’t spoil if the rain returns to New Harmony by the end, but I will reveal there were few dry eyes in the audience by the end.