By Sharon Eberson
Karla Boos knew she wanted Chimerica as a Quantum Theatre production since she saw its London debut in 2013. When Boos landed the rights five years later, her first call was to Susan Tsu.
In that pre-pandemic time, with Chimerica headed for Quantum’s 2019-20 season, acclaimed costume designer Tsu was on board, both for art direction and with a wealth of knowledge about the play’s focus: the 1989 protests and massacre in Tiananmen Square, and the image of the lone “Tank Man” that captured the world’s imagination.
Quantum’s production of Chimerica opens Saturday, Nov. 27, at the Maverick Hotel in East Liberty.
The term “Chimerica” was coined by an economist to represent the global dominance of the two superpowers. Lucy Kirkwood‘s play was expanded into a 2016 Brit TV Channel 4 series that is as much about the responsibilities of media as it is the legacy of Tiananmen Square. In fact, Kirkwood expanded her story to include then-candidate Donald Trump’s relationship to “fake news” in the screen version.
In the 2013 play, fictional American photojournalist Joe Schofield (Kyle Haden in Quantum’s production) is known for taking the iconic photo of the single unidentified protester who faced down a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square. Years later, Schofield gets a tip that Tank Man may be living in the United States.
Photos by Jason Snyder
The photographer’s quest to find him becomes an obsession, with consequences for everyone in his orbit. In Beijing, Schofield’s main contact, Zhang Lin (Hansel Tan), tells Joe about the murder of his neighbor and finds his own life in jeopardy.
For Tsu, that time of protest and violence in Beijing and elsewhere in China is seared into memory.
“Before we even talked about the play. I remember talking with Karla about having produced an event in Boston, right after the Tiananmen Square massacre, because I had been in China at a conference with [set designer] Ming Cho Lee and [theater historian] Arnold Aronson. We were talking about the state of design in America, but what Ming and I were actually doing, what we were most interested in doing, was getting some exchange to happen. So, we experienced firsthand the peaceful sit-ins in both Beijing and Shanghai and returned with hopes of maybe making some exchange with students and schools there.”
Tsu remembers that “all eyes of the world were on China because Mikhail Gorbachev was going there. And there had been no communication between the two countries, and these two juggernauts were finally meeting. So, the press and the photojournalists of the world were there.”
And that is how the unidentified Tank Man became a world symbol of bravery in the face of oppression and violence.
Many cameras were focused on the Chinese man, carrying shopping bags in each hand, who stood in front of a column of tanks leaving the square the day after the Chinese government’s violent crackdown on protestors. Estimates of the death toll vary from hundreds to several thousand, with thousands more wounded.
Anyone who lived through that time can’t help but recall the images that spread worldwide. In videos, he is seen shifting his position to block the oncoming tanks.
To this day, Tank Man remains unidentified, and that is where Kirkwood’s Chimerica comes in.
Although the play, and most of the world, have focused on that one man, Tsu points out that witnesses recall many who put themselves in harm’s way that day. But because Tank Man is the only one who photographed and filmed, he has become an icon of individual rebellion.
Tsu, a Carnegie Mellon alum and a professor in the CMU School of Drama, was at Boston University in 1989. Through three of her Chinese students, “I was privy to the news from China and what people were being told from Beijing.”
One student’s father, who lived on Chang’an (Eternal Peace) Avenue, beside Tiananmen Square, reported seeing a pregnant woman shot and killed. Yet, from the small province of Fujian, reports were that “some rowdy kids needed to be disciplined, but there was nothing about murders in the square.”
Anyone with ties to China was hungry for news. But even with so many media outlets on the scene, the reports differed from source to source.
“To make a long story short, it was devastating,” Tsu recalled. “I had a lump in my throat the entire summer.”
Tsu and her Boston colleagues went on to produce “a weeklong, consciousness-raising event so that people wouldn’t forget that it happened by August.”
The event had three parts: a benefit concert with Chinese singers and musicians, a panel of China experts, and a photo documentary exhibition.
The role of the photojournalist in Kirkwood’s play has been criticized by some American critics as unrealistic. Still, the power of the life-and-death images that escaped that horrific scene is not lost on Tsu.
She began to notice that many of the images coming out of China were by twins Peter and David Turnley, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist.
“I came to admire them greatly and also began to understand how intrepid they were, how brave and how much of a conscience they bring to our country by showing images from war fronts the world over,” Tsu said. “So, our pictures came from them, and their book ‘Beijing Spring’ has really helped all of us to be able to live in that place.”
Tsu’s experiences inform the look and feel of Chimerica, which includes cast members with Chinese and Korean backgrounds.
The entire cast, including several New York actors, were ready to perform the play before the pandemic shutdown and are back now.
The play and the players are being housed within the Maverick Hotel — formerly the Ace — where their rooms are upstairs, and the play takes place in what was a YMCA gym, which also was the venue for barebones productions’ 2017 production of The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity.
It has already been said that Tank Man is more of a symbol for the many protestors who gathered throughout China in the spring of 1989. And there was no single organization that represented the students and other activists who decided to take a “The movement was so pervasive, it grew like wildfire,” Tsu recalled. “There were every walk of life of humanity out there in this street supporting the students. When we were in China, it was like, wow, this is massive. This is really a story that totally sort of blew away the Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping [meeting] story.”
For Tsu, Chimerica‘s focus is just one story of that time, but it is not the definitive story.
“And the reason is this,” she said. “There’s more than one play that has been written about the massacre, in the Western view. And I realize, dramaturgically speaking, it’s more interesting if a character has a personal reason to stand against the establishment. But in my view, the Tank Man could have been any Chinese person having just gone shopping that day for groceries.”
Boos joined the conversation to weigh in on the play’s point of view.
“I don’t think it’s simply a pursuit of the Western notion of a hero that is at odds with the way a Chinese person would look at this,” she said. “I think it starts there, and it takes us on a journey. And that’s why I think it’s a good play.”
What hasn’t changed since Boos was first attracted to work is her excitement “to be doing a play that honors journalism and photojournalists,” she said, “even if our main character is sort of driven to find this answer. And whether or not we agree with him, I still feel that you know, I’m a visual person, so particularly the photographers who put their lives in danger to tell a story that we would never see otherwise, I think that we owe them an enormous amount.”
The singular image that Peter and David Turnley captured in 1989 just happened to be of one man, who stood in the path of moving tanks when the whole world was watching.
With Chimerica, Quantum Theatre hopes to bring his story back into focus for a new generation.
For more information on Quantum’s production of Chimerica at The Maverick Hotel (120 South Whitfield Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15206) including audience covid protocols, and to purchase tickets visit: https://www.quantumtheatre.com/chimerica/
Categories: Show Previews
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