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by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, directed by Nina Lee Aquino

Shaw Festival, Studio Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

August 18-October 5, 2025;

National Arts Centre, Ottawa

October 31-November 9, 2024

Dou Yi: “If we still live on a planet that hates injustice 

Snow will fall from the clouds and shield my remains”

Snow in Midsummer is the second in two plays at this year’s Shaw Festival adapted from classic Chinese plays of the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368). The first to open was The Orphan of Chao on June 22. Though the Shaw programme states that Snow in Midsummer is “Based on the classical Chinese drama The Injustice to Dou E That Moved Heaven and Earth by Guan Hanqing”, this is a gross overstatement. American playwright Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig has merely taken one element from the classic play and woven her own play set in the present day around it. Cowhig’s play does not represent the original play in form or structure and carries only four of its characters, three greatly altered, over into her play. Snow in Midsummer, therefore, has to be judged as an original play by Cowhig, not as an adaptation of a Yuan drama. As it is, Cowhig’s mixing of the everyday and the supernatural makes her play seem more in the vein of a streaming series like Netflix’s Stranger Things.

The Injustice to Dou E That Moved Heaven and Earth (感天動地竇娥冤), also known as Snow in Midsummer (五月雪), by Guan Hanqing (關漢卿, c.1241–1320) features a central female character, Dou E, who is held up as a model of virtue. When the father of a man who wishes to marry Dou E is murdered, Dou E confesses in order to protect her mother-in-law, Mother Cai. Brought before a corrupt judge, Dou E professes her innocence but is condemned to death. Before her execution, she swears that three events will occur after her death that will prove her innocence: her blood will not spill on her white clothes or the ground; snow will fall in June and cover her body; her home prefecture will be afflicted with severe drought for three years. Indeed, these three things come to pass, her innocence is proved and she no longer has to wander the earth as a ghost but can move on to the afterlife.

This is the one core story around which Cowhig creates her own play. When Cowhig’s play opens we meet Dou E, now called Dou Yi, as she tries to sell animals made of folded palm fronds. We then switch to a group scene where workers are gathered at Nurse Wong’s bar in Jiangsu Province. There Handsome Zhang proposes to Rocket Wu and the others cheer the two men on. Now the action may be set in the present, but it’s very hard to believe that such a scene could take place in modern China. In 1997 China decriminalized same-sex sexual activity, but in 2016 a study found that only 5% of gay people had even come out. Cowhig moves closer to reality when she shows that Handsome, the son of a businessman, and Rocket, the son of a judge, immediately plan to emigrate.

The main problem facing the workers is a drought that has lasted for three years so far. The businesswoman Tianyun wants to buy the factory which manufactures artificial flowers and seek a solution to its water problems. Meanwhile, Tianyun’s young daughter Fei-Fei has been having visions of strange woman and wants to send food and clothing to her by making offerings at a temple.

Parallel with this problem is a disagreement that arises between Handsome and Rocket. Handsome has paid for a heart transplant for Rocket and knew that the donor was a woman (Dou Yi) who had been executed. Rocket is outraged that Handsome would permit such a thing since Rocket hates the thought that he is alive because of a condemned criminal’s heart. The ghost of Dou Yi is also unhappy with the situation and wants her heart back since it is the only part of her that was not cremated.

Gradually, the already bad situation of the workers, Tianyun, Fei-Fei, Handsome and Rocket grows worse. Without water the workers want to move away, Tianyun can’t run a plant without workers, Fei-Fei’s obsession grows deeper and Handsome and Rocket break up.

By chance Tianyun visits a massage therapist Mother Cai, who knows more about Tianyun than does Tianyun herself. Finally, Cowhig gives us a flashback and we see how the events transpired that led to the death of Handsome Zhang’s father and the confession of Dou Yi.

The original Chinese play presents the events in chronological order with Dou E’s execution taking place in Act 3 followed by the fulfilling of her curses. In the fourth and final act, she appears before her father (absent in Cowhig), who is now a government official. He reopens her case and finds and punishes the evil-doers. The original play places emphasis on Dou E as a woman so virtuous that she seeks justice even after death.

Cowhig turns the play primarily into a modern ghost story where we and most of the characters wonder what strange force is wreaking havoc upon their community. The irony is that the ancient play spends far more time depicting the many injustices that Dou E suffers before her execution than does the modern play. A further irony is that the ancient play, by not delaying crucial information until halfway through the action, much more clearly shows why Dou E is so keen to protect her mother-in-law. To make her new plot work Cowhig relies on a sudden, inexplicable about-face on the part of the mother-in-law. Logically, her betrayal should negate Dou Yi’s desire to protect her, but Cowhig does not follow the logic of the original.

Despite the many flaws in Cowhig’s play, director Nina Lee Aquino makes the best of what she’s given. The world of Cowhig’s play is modern and industrial but also so otherworldly that she actually features the mythological guardians of the underworld, Ox-Head and Horse-Face as characters. Camellia Koo’s set that looks like the remains of a ruined building, Joanna Yu’s costumes both traditional and modern and Michelle Ramsay’s eerily gorgeous lighting, espcially when illuminating falling petals of snow or blood all create a space that feels like a portal linking the mundane and the supernatural.

Aquino draws committed performances from the entire ensemble. Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster in particular speaks with such passion and authority that her every appearance re-grounds the action just when it is about to descend into melodrama. Lancaster distinguishes the living Dou Yi from Dou Yi’s ghost by lending the ghost a calmness of speech and demeanour that contrasts with the living Dou Yi’s anger and fear. Lancaster’s performance makes such an impact that Dou Yi seems present even when Lancaster is physically absent.

The second most important character in Cowhig’s version is the businesswoman Tianyun, well played by Donna Soares. Soares begins my showing Tianyun as confident and efficient, but as Fei-Fei’s obsession grows and the drought continues, Soares allows increasing doubt and worry to creep into Tianyun’s personality. Her child Fei-Fei is an example of a cliché in popular culture that children are more in touch with the supernatural than are adults, a trope that goes back at least to Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw (1898). Lee is convincing as a 10-year-old who at first unknowingly feels drawn to a figure she sees in a storybook and who feels ever more urgently the need to help her.

As Handsome Zhang and Rocket Wu, Michael Man and Jonathan Tan makes a well-matched couple, with Man as the more intellectual, Tan as the more emotional of the two. Cowhig’s manufacturing of Rocket’s heart transplant is an extreme measure to work in the symbol of a heart, and the fight of Handsome and Rocket over the transplant is hard to believe. Nevertheless, Man and Tan make us focus more on the conflict of the couple’s emotions rather than on the source of the conflict. In a flashback, Man plays a great scene of coming out his father where hope for acceptance suddenly tuns to fear at his father rage.

John Ng plays unlikeable characters to the hilt. We know in a few minutes that Dou Yi will receive no justice from the lascivious Judge Wu. As Handsome’s father Master Zhang, the wrath he unleashes on his son for his son’s honesty is truly frightening. The fight Richard Lee has designed between father and son will have you covering your eyes.

Kelly Wong’s main role of several is that of Doctor Lu. In the ancient Chinese play, Lu is a thorough villain who tries to strangle Mother Cai for collecting a debt. Cowhig has completely changed Lu’s nature. Wong plays him as efficient and caring but one who doesn’t want to question too closely where his hospital receives its transplant organs. Wong really makes Lu sympathetic when we see that the doctor regularly looks after for the temple and clearly has a deeply spiritual side. Manami Hara plays the rousingly jolly Nurse Wong who contrasts completely with the mysteriously intense Mother Cai.

Snow in Midsummer is a zaju (雜劇) play as is The Orphan of Chao, meaning that the original play contained prose, poetry, dance, singing, mime and comedy. Cowhig omits the singing and dance but does try to include comedy. This she relegates to Officers 1, 2 and 3 played by Travis Seetoo, Cosette Derome and Lindsay Wu. Cowhig’s forte is obviously atmosphere and interpersonal relations because, no fault of the actors, none of the comedy is funny and is often off-putting.

After seeing Cowhig’s Snow in Midummer, the first thing I longed to see was a production of Guan Hanqing’s play in an adaptation that hewed closer to the original text both to see why he is thought the great master of the Yuan drama and to learn what made this play his greatest success. Though Yuan drama has nothing to do with Shaw, at least, one hopes, the Festival’s experiments will encourage audiences to see more works from the period in versions, one hopes, that are far more faithful to their originals than those now on offer.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Eponine Lee as Fei-Fei; Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster as Dou Yi; Eponine Lee as Fei-Fei and Donna Soares as Tianyun.© 2024 David Cooper.

For ticket visit: www.shawfest.com or nac-cna.ca.