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With only a couple of weeks remaining before opening night of her latest production, “The Empress Dowager” at the Theater for New York City in Manhattan May 31, the director was getting just a little nervous. The costumes had yet to arrive from China as of May 17 and dress parade, in which all the costumes for the production are paraded under stage lighting to determine defects, misfits, etc., had been scheduled for the next week.
“Being in live theater you live dangerously and hopefully from minor crisis to minor crisis,” explained Sister Joanna Chan, M.M., who also happens to be a celebrated playwright, director and founder of the Yangtze Repertory Theatre of America.
“Of course, if our costumes fail to arrive, then that is not a minor crisis!”
Her small office, the walls festooned with pictures, posters, awards and other memorabilia of a life in theater, would not look out of place in one of those slightly dowdy pre-war buildings overlooking Time Square. But this first-floor office is on the grounds of Maryknoll’s bucolic headquarters in Ossining. Outside her window, the sound of honking horns is replaced with the twitter of birds and the breeze carries the sweet smell of spring.
“If that happens,” she said of the wayward wardrobe’s late or non-arrival, “we’ll put everyone in black and I’ll come out and tell (the audience) what happened and say, ‘But we’ll perform for you.’ I’m a pessimist usually and playwrights are very imaginative, so I usually imagine the worst.”
Sister Joanna founded the Yangtze Repertory Theatre in 1992 to produce works for and by Asian artists. The company has presented 76 events and has become New York’s preeminent entry point for theatrical works from China and a home for Asian artists generally.
“The Empress Dowager,” which Sister Joanna adapted from a series of historical novels by Goa Yang, tells the story of Empress Dowager Cixi, the powerful, ruthless and politically dexterous woman who effectively ruled the Manchu Dynasty from behind the throne from 1861 until her death in 1908. In recounting her story, the play also tells the story of China, an ancient culture coming to grips with its place the modern world. Cixi led China through the Boxer Rebellion, an ill-advised and uneven military confrontation with occupying western powers at the turn of the 20th century. The Manchu Dynasty collapsed in 1911, three years after her death, giving rise to the republican era and the chaos that ensued through most of the 20th century.
Sister Joanna said there is much to admire in Cixi and also much to be appalled by.
“For me there is no absolute black and white. I do have lots of sympathy for her,” she said. “At least I feel I understand what she was going through in her head. She was probably more intelligent than a whole lot of the men surrounding her.”
Sister Joanna’s company for this production is an eclectic combination of stage actors that could only happen in New York. Among the cast are two African-Americans, two Filipinos, three actors from Hong Kong, as well as actors from China. The star, KarYan Zhang, is a major film and television star in her native Malaysia but is virtually unknown here. Each actor will be speaking Mandarin, with varying levels of proficiency (English subtitles will be provided).
“It was an open audition,” she explained. “They were very brave. They had to memorize word for word, sound for sound. Our language is tonal. There are only four tones but once you say the wrong tone, it means a totally different thing. When we started we had to figure out how many actors needed help, and each was adopted by another actor as their (Mandarin) coach. I was teasing them just last week. I was talking to those still struggling, working very hard, and I said, ‘Well, you’re all professional actors, when in doubt fake it! Just say it out loud as if this is the right thing to say because the Chinese audience will love you for it.’ Really the Chinese are very non-judgmental on people trying to speak our language.” For good measure, she said she will be supplying Chinese subtitles as well, “to help the audience” through any mangled syntax.
When asked how she would describe herself, Sister Joanna offers “writer.” But she is much more than that. She has also directed in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Canada and the United States for more than 35 years. She’s written some 50 productions or adaptations. She once wrote a column in Hong Kong for the New Evening Post and is also an accomplished painter.
Her 2001 play, “One Family, One Child, One Door,” a black comedy on the Chinese government’s one-child policy, was named one of two finalists in the Jane Chambers Playwriting Contest.
First and foremost, though, she is a Maryknoll nun.
“I think I fell in love,” she said. “I was only 17 and I fell in love with Jesus. And I think I’m one of the lucky ones because I have not fallen out of love. And that’s behind everything I do.”
Then she quickly added with a mischievous twinkle in her eye, “That’s not the story I usually tell. The story I usually tell is I was watching the Nun’s Story and I thought to be able to wear a long skirt, to serve people and to look as pretty as Audrey Hepburn, that’s a pretty good way to spend my life! But I think I’m old enough to tell the true story. Next year will be my golden jubilee.”
Born into an evangelical family in Guangzhou, China, she converted to Catholicism along with the rest of her family when she was 15. She entered Maryknoll in 1964. There have been some interesting confluences along the way in which she’s been able to combine her ministry with her literary career, once with seemingly miraculous results.
Since 2002 she’s been working in the Rehabilitation Through Arts program with inmates at neighboring Sing Sing Prison in Ossining. In November 2006 she directed the critically acclaimed “Oedipus Rex” by Sophocles. That is when she met a prisoner named Eric Glisson, then serving a lengthy sentence for slaying a Bronx taxi driver. She got to know the young man, who was performing in the chorus.
Eventually he told her he was innocent. Not an unusual story perhaps, since prison authorities hear such protestations all the time. But Sister Joanna, for whatever reason, began to think he might be telling her the truth. So she put him in touch with a lawyer who had done some pro-bono work for her theater company. The young convict had been keeping a voluminous file on his case and turned it over to the lawyer. In October 2012 he walked free, fully exonerated. He had spent 17 years in prison.
“I said, ‘Eric I want to be standing there to welcome you as a free man,”’ Sister Joanna said. “I absolutely want to be there.”
It wasn’t to be. The case was delayed in procedural entanglements. When Glisson finally did win his freedom, Sister Joanna was in Hong Kong. He called her long distance to give her the news. “Eric got on the phone and said, ‘Grandma, I’m free!’ It was about 8:30 in the morning after I went to Mass.
“I certainly did not join a religious congregation to become a playwright or a director,” she said. “But after I started in Sing Sing it dawned on me why. I think the theater, the process of rehearsal, the negotiating process, respecting every single individual with the common good in mind. I think that is a very Christian process.”
