A real-life episode right out of a political thriller proved to be playwright Marjorie Chan’s map to Tiananmen Square.
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A few years ago she wrote a monologue for Theatre Direct about the 1989 Beijing student demonstrations that became a bloodbath when the government turned tanks and assault weapons against the students.
“Then I met a human rights activist who asked what I was working on next,” recalls the playwright. “I told him about the monologue, and he asked me to meet him late at night on a deserted Toronto street. I drove my car up to his and he unloaded two boxes of audio tapes, magazines and flyers, all relating to the massacre.
“These documents – eyewitness accounts of the massacre, mimeoed and handwritten sheets – had extraordinary power for me. I’ll never learn the history or the fate of the people who created them.”
From that material and other research, Chan fashioned The Madness Of The Square, a play about five Chinese students and an intern Western reporter caught up in the exuberance and later the tragedy of the Tiananmen Square standoff.
At its centre is Fan-Ying, an average student who discovers that the rights she thinks she enjoys must be fought for. Caught up with student activists and some peers with other reasons for occupying the square, Fan-Ying learns that politics are lived and not just discussed in the classroom.
“She’s the most ordinary of all my female creations,” says Chan, whose other plays include China Doll and A Nanking Winter. “Fan-Ying is distant from me in terms of her politics and everyday decisions. Yet as the play’s central character, she’s someone I have to love and care about as I take her through the play.”
Another challenge was how to write a piece about a historic event whose outcome the audience knows.
“The questions of why and how it happens, how the characters got there, is the journey of the piece. Who are these anonymous students, initially hungry and poor, cogs in the complicated bureaucratic machine that is China, who become media darlings and learn to speak to the world through video cameras?”
In addition to telling the narrative, Chan’s created a chorus who comment on the action.
“The chorus helps to move Fan-Ying through the story, reminding her and instructing the audience about the reality, the immediacy of the events. The issues are timeless. Even today we’re talking about the massacre.”
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