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‘Wild Swans,’ a memoir of China streamlined for the stage

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February 04, 2012|By Jeffrey Gantz

Katie Leung in rehearsal for the American Repertory Theaters production… (CHRIS NASH )

It starts in the Chinese province of Manchuria in 1924 when, Jung Chang writes, “At the age of fifteen my grandmother became the concubine of a warlord general.’’ It ends in 1978, as Chang herself takes flight to a new life in London. In between, in Chang’s 500-page memoir, “Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China,’’ her parents - both of them young, idealistic communists - meet, marry, fight Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, move to the Sichuan city of Chengdu, and survive famine before falling victim to the endless purges of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution and being exiled to labor camps. It’s a bone-chilling tale of tyranny and mass murder. It’s also, in its depiction of bravery and beauty, a love letter to China.

Now, in a Cambridge-London co-production that follows years of development in Britain, it’s taking the stage. “Wild Swans,’’ a joint venture of the American Repertory Theater, the Young Vic, and Actors Touring Company, is getting its world premiere at the Loeb Drama Center, where it began previews yesterday. Young Vic artistic director David Lan, a mentor to ART artistic director Diane Paulus, sought the collaboration in part to tap this country’s deeper pool of Asian actors. After a monthlong run at the ART, it will open at the Young Vic in April.

Speaking by phone on her lunch break in London, where rehearsals were held before the company arrived in Cambridge this month, director Sacha Wares recalls that it all started in 2006, when Lan asked Wares if she would be interested in adapting “Wild Swans,’’ a huge bestseller after its publication in 1991. By that time, Wares says, there had already been some film script attempts, and even a proposed miniseries, but they had all failed.

“It’s very, very, very difficult to find a way to adapt it,’’ she notes, “because the book is so long and so complex and so rich. There are maybe 25 different versions of plays that you could write from that book. We managed to get to this point because we had so much exploration time.’’

Wares and her longtime colleague, designer Miriam Buether, decided after innumerable workshops “that we wanted to capture the sense of enormous change that the characters undergo in the book. So we came away with the design idea of five acts, in really different spaces, with really different moods. And we had decided by that point that we wanted to concentrate on the middle part of the story, which is the story of the husband and wife, as opposed to doing the full three generations.’’