Madam Mao

Or: Right to Rebel

In 1991, a solitary cell somewhere in the People’s Republic of China, The White Bone Demon keeps the embers of her dreams, ideals, and stories alive. Jaing Qing (Janet Lo) once an actress, then wife of Chairman Mao, then face and voice of the infamous Cultural Revolution, and finally the scapegoat for the deaths and sufferings caused by the regime, has been awaiting trial for fifteen years. Now at an ambitious young sergeant (Samantha Wan) has appeared determined to get a confession with the hard weight of facts.

Devised by Lo, Wan, Severen Thompson, and Paul Thompson, Madam Mao curiously examines a shrouded time of history and the woman charged with instigating it. They pull out all the stops. Before even the doors are open young, stone-faced women, dressed in the uniform of the Red Guard stand sentinel in the theater and, once inside, oppress the audience into a proper form, “The People’s Republic demands you sit in the center section!” It’s ticklish, but also terrifying, as though we are being corralled into witnessing a state-promoted struggle session, one of the most authentic and bloody pieces of theater ever devised. Indeed much of Jaing Qing’s life is explored through the memory of an actress and director: Lo playing both parts of her younger self and the charismatic Chairman, or narrating the stories of her eight Model Plays, for ten years the only theater to be produced in China, where a zealous Red Guard performer (Amanda Zhou), dances her way through the balletic militancy of the plays accompanied by musician Heidi Chan.

While Lo balances the brittleness of Jaing Qing’s affronted captivity well the struggle sessions between her and the Sargent lack a certain urgency, even at their most dangerous. It is not through lack of trying, but the tug of war is held to close to the center of the rope, and neither ever really loses their footing. More compelling is Wan’s private confessions while practicing martial arts stances, the energy in her body flowing through muscle to fingertip as she describes walking the delicate tightrope of being a servant to the people. Even more captivating is her performance as the Trickster a pantomime character from the traditional opera, nearly hunted to extinction in the Cultural Revolution, now relishing having the last laugh.

Despite the horrors laid before us, the personal and genocidal betrayals, Lo and co. still gives us a votive candle for the White Bone Demon. She took the fall for Mao’s tyranny and the crimes of the government as a whole, dressed in the colors of a monster by men who would not see a woman (who’s plays and speeches always encouraged women to dream of and seize more for themselves) leading the Revolution. And there’s a point, right at the beginning, when Zhou importunes the audience with a Red guard speech, noting the wrongness of the world and the hope, the duty, of changing it, where could forget history and embrace the idea. At least until the facts break through the thin, glittering ice, and we are sucked into the black waters of the truth.