A reading of a seriocomic play by a queer Taiwanese-Canadian playwright will depict a socio-cultural clash between a woman and her grandmother.
As part of TheatreOne’s Emerging Voices program, which aims to supports playwrights through workshops and public readings, Lily Chang will present her first play, Leila Roils the Seas, as a staged reading at the Port Theatre.
Chang, who grew up in Surrey and now lives in Montréal, studied at McGill University, earning a bachelor of arts in English literature, before continuing to earn an master’s degree in English literature and creative writing at Concordia University. She was short-listed for the CBC Nonfiction Prize and the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Diverse Writers Grant in 2018.
At its core, Leila Roils the Seas is about the loss of a beloved but also frustrating and infuriating grandmother – though more specifically, is about the bond and generational social class between a Taiwanese-Canadian woman and her Taiwanese grandmother.
When the main character, Leila, finds out that her grandmother has fallen into a coma, she returns to her birth country Taiwan, only to discover that she alone can see and interact with her grandmother’s spirit outside of her comatose body. The conflict, Chang said, is that her grandmother wants Leila to help her move on to the celestial realm of Pure Land Buddhism; however, Leila doesn’t want her grandmother to move on and also doesn’t believe in the after life.
“She’s also quite angry about her grandmother’s history of violence that she’s learning about and confronting throughout the play. Also because it’s bringing out her own trauma and experiences,” the playwright said. “Most of the characters are based on real people. So it’s quite a personal story with heavy subjects.”
Chang said she was interested in approaching these issues through the use of “seriocomedy” – a comedy with serious elements – by utilizing magical realism, laughter and irony, as well as fun elements like Chinese opera and a chicken dance.
“I wanted to create something joyful and fun while looking at these heavy subjects … There’s some relief of tension through laughter, but we’re looking at something quite serious … and I wanted to capture the chaos of Taiwanese family dynamics,” she said, adding that there is often “a lot going on,” be it constantly barking dogs, non-stop ringing telephones or a television that’s never turned off. “I’m using cacophony. I’m using silence.”
Chang was inspired by the stories of her grandmother who was sold to another family to work as a labourer at the age of seven during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan. The playwright wanted to capture her resilience and “the impact of Pure Land Buddhism on her life of survival.” She was also driven by the need to not only confront the loss of one’s family, cultural language and homeland, but to also confront the different types of violence that are perpetuated and experienced in multi-generational families. As part of research for the play, Chang interviewed and recorded her grandmother, who is still alive today, and researched the perception of corporal punishments in East Asian societies.
Written in 2022, Leila Roils the Seas was presented as an abridged version at the St-Ambroise Montréal Fringe Festival last June where it garnered two Frankie Award nominations and one win for Most Promising Emerging English Producer. The show was also featured on CBC’s All in a Weekend with Sonali Karnick last May. In December, Leila Roils the Seas won first place in Infinithéâtre’s annual Write-on-Q Playwriting Competition and was presented in a reading directed by author Sophie Gee.
In efforts to bring the play to audiences and artists outside of Montreal, the show will be presented in two staged readings in B.C.; as part of the Emerging Voices program, and as part of the Advance Theatre Festival with Ruby Slippers Theatre in Vancouver.
The B.C. premiere will show at the Port Theatre in the Harmac Room on Sunday, Jan. 28, at 2 p.m.
Entry will be by donation at the door.
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