Yangtze Repertory Theatre of America
2 Mott St., Suite 706
NYC, NY 10013
Dr. Joanna Chan, Artistic Director

Founded three seasons ago in 1994, Yangtze Repertory Theatre of America is an outgrowth of the Four Seas Theatre, which began in the early 1970s as an attempt to cater to the theatre needs of immigrant Chinese Americans in the New York area. That project went fallow when Dr. Chan left to become the director of the National Hong Kong Repertory Theatre, the national theatre for Hong Kong.

When she returned to the US in the early 1990s, she began Yangtze, aiming it for a broader audience. Generally, it does four projects, two in the visual arts and two in the performing arts, the latter usually done at Theater for the New City in Manhattan. A typical theatrical production would be like the Fall 1996 production of The Sound of a Voice, by David Henry Hwang and The Eternal Game by Wang Wei-zhong; both are done in English with Madarin subtitles (though at least one future project is being done in Mandarin with English subtitles).

From the New York Theatre-Wire page:
Joanna Chan is Artistic Director of Yangtze Repertory Theatre of America, a company she co-founded in 1992, dedicated to works by and for Asian artists. She has also headed New York's Four Seas Players (1970-77, 83-92) and the Hong Kong Repertory Theatre (1986-90). As a playwright, her major works include "Before the Dawn-wind Rises, an English translation of which will be part of an Oxford Anthology of Chinese Contemporary Drama due out next summer, Crown Ourselves with Roses, commissioned by Sing Tao Newspapers, which toured the US in 1989 and "The Soongs: By Dreams Betrayed," a political drama published in Hong Kong in 1992.

She has adapted and directed over 40 productions since 1970, including both Chinese and American works. A major figure in both Hong Kong theater and Chinese-American theater in NYC, she has been honored here by the NYC City Council and Teachers College at Columbia University for her career as playwright and director. Jan Stuart (Newsday) labeled Fou Lei and Fou Ts'ong, a true family tragedy of a world-class Chinese pianist which she produced and starred in, as "a jewel of theater craftsmanship "

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