Adapted by Alexandra Wood from Jung Chang’s best-selling memoir, “Wild Swans’’ tells the story of a family’s precarious passage through the three tumultuous decades of Mao Zedong’s rule.
This coproduction by the ART, the Young Vic, and the Actors Touring Company features a cast of 17 and an ever-shifting variety of settings (a field, a hospital ward, a village, an apartment, an office, a work camp, a city). The design team has done superlative work on “Wild Swans,’’ with particularly ingenious creations by Beijing video artist Wang Gongxin. A scene from the 1970s that illustrates the whirlwind pace of modernization in China, post-Mao, features some of the most dynamic use of video I’ve ever seen onstage.
I wish Wood had paused, during the sprint through the decades, long enough to build more full-bodied character portraits of the family at the center of “Wild Swans.’’ But the family’s story is inherently so compelling that a cumulative emotional impact does register, especially when one considers that their travails are a microcosm of the suffering of millions.
The family consists of De-Hong (Ka-Ling Cheung) and her husband, Shou-Yu (Orion Lee), who rise to official positions in the Communist Party only to fall calamitously from grace; their daughter, Er-Hong, based on Jung Chang and portrayed by Katie Leung (who played Cho Chang in the “Harry Potter’’ films); and De-Hong’s mother, Yu-Fang (Julyana Soelistyo), who was forced to be a warlord’s concubine during the pre-Mao era.
Their performances are competent, no more - perhaps because the actors carry the burden of dialogue that often comes across as italicized talking points, pronouncements, or slogans, even during nonpolitical exchanges.
“Wild Swans’’ is much more effective in its depiction of the human costs of a system that was born of a desire to rectify social injustice, but that quickly spiraled into an ideological madness bent on the annihilation of the spirit.
