Snow in Midsummer at OSF

Or: Weeping Heaven and Broken Earth

When we first meet the Widow Dou Yi her hands are filled with life. Jessica Ko solicits us, before the beginning of Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s masterful ghost story, a cheerful women buoyed up against the hardships of her life. She sells palm weavings of animals and insects, the ten thousand things that make up the universe, and reminds us both to turn off our cellphone and, more soberly, of the injustices done in our own country, past and present on the land we sit on.

Over the course of the two hours traffic we see Ko transform to a terrifying spirit, as framed for the murder of a local official, she is executed and her body harvested, returning as a white robed ghost of bitter grief. From her scaffold she curses the town of New Harmony, and those that might have opened their mouths to save her. Now three years later, she haunts the dreams of Tianyun (Amy Kim Wasche) and her young daughter Fei-Fei (Olivia Pham).

A retelling of The Injustice to Dou Yi That Moved Heaven and Earth, a story by the Yaun dynasty playwright Guan Hanquing, Ya-Chu Cowhig’s script is a thrilling mixture of poetic, Shakespearian verse and modern quirks (a chilling example being Dou Yi’s execution, where Ko curses the town to three years of drought and swears that, if she be innocent, snow will fall from the June sky and cover her body. Then, as she is shot, her executioners pause to take selfies with her body). The reveals plotted spring from totally unexpected corners but you can see their roots stretching all the way back through the play.

The lines also mold and lift the actors talents. Particularly in the relationship of Handsom Zhang (Daisuke Tsuji) and Rocket Wu (Will Dao), the town’s power couple, whose tender moments with each other are underlined by the scripts poetry, as wells the chemistry between the actors coaxing what could be an overly subtle performance into performances of power. Wasche subtle excellence as Tainyun (always holding tight to the tails of her feelings) turns her into the best kind of artist, one who electrifies scenes with others. Particularly electrifying is her exchange with Mother Cai (Nasuko Omaha, who doubles as the maternally sharp Nurse Wong) a blind masseuse and Dou Yi’s adoptive mother, each connected and feeding the other by flesh and focus.

It’s also the perfect example of Macro Theater. It would facilitating to see Snow in Midsummer done in simplicity but there is something deeply satisfying about the Oregon Shakespeare Festivel using its considerable resources and talents to give Ya-Chu Cowhig exactly what her script demands. Some of it comes from lightly beautiful touches, as the projections of a spectral world, or the brutality of an execution. But sometimes you need a twenty foot statue of the Goddess of Mercy to magically appear or a ghost to rip somebody’s heart straight out of their chest.

Director Justin Audibert has all put his own fine touches, working with composer Paul james Prendergast to create the rattling drums of the natural world twisting itself, or throbbing nightclub pulses that accompany a traditional Rain Dance. There is also the continuation of OSF’s much beloved tradition of sign, the villagers signing and speaking with the forthright Worker Chen (Monique Holt), who takes Fei-Fei under her wing and gives her communication when the child gives up her voice.

Rather than a litany of woe I found a meditation of wrongs, and the long and uneven road for writing them a fortifying story in the present time, when injustice seems to consume everything, and every happiness seems bought at the expense of another’s misery. To see it beautifully staged and touchingly spoken brought a strange comfort, even amidst the violence, even amid the threat of a killing snow.