Eileen Chang to New York

Yangtze Repertory Theatre presents "The Naked Earth"
-- a play (in English) by Evans Chan based on Eileen Chang's 1954 novel
Bank Street Theatre, 155 Bank Street, New York City
Thursday through Saturday, June 1-3 & June 8-11 at 7.30pm
Sundays, June 4 & 11 at 3pm
Admission: $15; $10 for students and seniors; TDF accepted
Reservations: 718/ 263 8829
Press contact: Audrey Ross (tel: 212 586 3500, fax: 586 3681)

YANGTZE REPERTORY THEATRE, the company devoted to presenting works by Asian writers, is proud to present The Naked Earth, a new play by award-winning critic/filmmaker Evans Chan, based on the 1954 novel by Eileen Chang. Performed in English, the play will be directed by Dr. Joanna Chan, Artistic Director of Yangtze; choreography is by Yung Yung Tsuai; set by Anne Lommel; lighting design by Aaron Spivey; music by Sola Liu.

The novel Naked Earth by the much-revered Eileen Chang (Chang Ai-ling) -- whose work has been adapted for the screen by Hou Hsiao-hsien (Flowers of Shanghai), Ann Hui (Eighteen Springs), Stanley Kwan (Red Rose, White Rose) and other noted Chinese filmmakers -- was published in Hong Kong in 1954 shortly after Chang fled China in 1952. Its depiction of a forgotten chapter in the horrendous years of the founding of the PRC has guaranteed its banned status in China until the present time. Chang passed away in 1995 in Los Angeles after four decades' reclusive exile in the US. Despite her obscurity in America, her literary reputation has soared in the Chinese speaking world. The New York Times obituary (September 13, 1995) noted that "[her] finely honed psychological studies and precise language won her acclaim as a giant of modern Chinese literature."

The Naked Earth unfolds as Liu Chuen, a Chinese POW in the Korean War, while being interrogated by Herb, a US army officer, recounts his political troubles and romantic entanglement with two women, Su Nan and Ko Shan, in a China already embroiled in lethal social turmoil. Dealing with love and betrayal on many levels -- between friends, lovers, husbands and wives, as well as between an ancient culture and its leader -- the play probes the bitter end of an era as the characters struggle to survive government campaigns that are the forerunners of Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The Yangtze presentation of "The Naked Earth" in 2000 is an act of remembrance -- of forgotten heroes and a neglected novelist.

(This event is made possible with public funds from the New York State
Council on the Arts and a grant from the Alliance of Resident Theatres/NY)

Eileen Chang

Considered by some to be China's most important writer of the 20th century,
Eileen Chang (1920-1995) grew up in an illustrious family marked both by the
ancien regime's decadence (an opium-smoking father) and the lure of the
progressive West (a divorced mother who went abroad to study arts). A
precocious writer, Chang gained literary fame for her short stories and
essays while living in a cosmopolitan Shanghai under Japanese occupation in
the 1940's. However, her political difficulties -- for a short-lived
marriage to a Pro-Japanese writer, and a literary style influenced more by
classical Chinese novels than the didactic "new" literature of her time --
caused her to keep a low profile after the war. She finally fled Communist
China and emigrated to the US in 1955. She once said of China (the fate of
which "engrossed" her and which "took [her] three years to make up [her] mind
to leave"):

"...there was decay and a vacuum, a need to believe in something. In the
final disintegration of ingrown latter-day Confucianism, some Chinese seeking
a way out of the prevalent materialistic nihilism, turned to Communism. To
many others Communist rule is also more palatable than a reversion to the old
order, only replacing the family with the larger blood kin, the state...What
concerns me most is the few decades in between, the years of dilapidation and
last furies, chaos and uneasy individualism...any changes in the future are
likely to have germinated from the brief taste of freedom, as China is
isolated by more factors than the US containment policy..."

The Playwright's Statement:

With its story set in the time of the Korean War, Eileen Chang's The Naked
Earth seems especially suitable for a contemporary English-language
production for an American audience. Liu Chuen's journey pulls us into a
nexus of love and politics, unravelling a coming-of-age story, as well as a
tale of sexual awakening and political disillusionment. In my attempt to
reshape the materials based also on hindsight and contemporary scholarship, I
invented the character Herb, whose profile is partly inspired by John
Service, the honorable "China Hand" purged by the McCarthy witch-hunt. As I
did my research, I sensed the significance of that "forgotten war" in Mao's
strategy to mobilize, in Chang's words, "an exhausted people" so as to
institute and solidify totalitarian rule. Already encapsulating all the
untold terrors that would visit the Chinese people in the next half century,
those early years of the PRC, thanks to Eileen Chang, are tragically evoked
in The Naked Earth. --- Evans Chan

(Evans Yiu Shing Chan is the award-winning director of two feature films --
To Liv(e) and Crossings -- and two documentaries -- Adeus Macau and Journey
to Beijing, a '99 Berlin Film Festival "Forum" selection and a Best
Documentary nominee at the '98 Hawaii Film festival. His films have been
shown, among others, at the Bombay, Taipei, Singapore, Sydney, Montreal,
Jerusalem, Rotterdam, Mannheim, Copenhagen and London film festivals and he
has presented seminars and screenings of his work at Cornell, Duke and New
York universities. His adaption of The Life & Times of Ng Chung Yin -- a
"fascinating account" (Village Voice) of a Chinese radical -- was staged at
the Theatre for the New City in October, 1998. Chan's recent publication, The
Last of the Chinese, which contains extensive essays on Eileen Chang, was
named the Best Book of criticism by the '99 Hong Kong Biannual Literary
Awards.)