americanrepertorytheater.org 2011/2012 SEASON WILD SWANS


Wild Swans is a Young Vic/ American Repertory Theater/ Actors Touring Company co-production. After the production’s run at the A.R.T., it will be performed in London in April, 2012.


FEB. 11 - MAR. 11, 2012


As change sweeps over their country, a family endures hardships through sacrifice, courage, and love. A world premiere adaptation of Jung Chang’s bestselling memoir.


By Jung Chang | Adapted by Alexandra Wood | Directed by Sacha Wares


THE ART OF THE MEMOIR FROM THE INTRODUCTION TO WILD SWANS: THREE DAUGHTERS OF CHINA BY JUNG CHANG


Wild Swans was first published in 1991. The event changed my life, because I finally became a writer.


I had always dreamed of being a writer. But when I was growing up in China, the idea of writing for publication seemed out of the question. In those years, the country was under Mao’s tyranny, and most writers suffered appallingly in endless political persecutions. Many were denounced, some sent to labor camps, and some driven to suicide. In 1966 through 1967, during Mao’s Great Purge misnamed the Cultural Revolution, the majority of books in people’s homes were burned. My father, who had been a Communist official but had fallen victim, was forced to burn his beloved collection, and this was one of the main things that drove him to insanity. Even writing for oneself was extremely dangerous. I had to tear up the first poem I ever wrote, which was on my sixteenth birthday on 25


March 1968, and flush it down the toilet because my father’s persecutors had come to raid our apartment.


But I had an urge to write, and kept on writing with an imaginary pen. In the next few years, I worked as a peasant and an electrician. While I was spreading manure in the paddy fields and checking power distribution at the top of electricity poles, I would polish long passages in my mind, or commit short poems to memory. I came to Britain in September 1978. Mao had died two years earlier, and China was beginning to emerge from the stifling isolation he had imposed on the country. For the first time since the founding of Communist China, scholarships for studying abroad were awarded on academic, not political, grounds. I was able to leave the country after taking these exams, and was perhaps the first person from the landlocked province of Sichuan, which then had a


population of about 90 million, to study in the West since 1949. With incredible good fortune, at last I had the freedom to write, and to write what I wanted. […] But it was years before I wrote Wild


Swans. Subconsciously, I resisted the idea of writing. I was unable to dig deep into my memory. In the violent Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976, my family suffered atrociously. Both my father and my grandmother died painful deaths. I did not want to relive my grandmother’s years of untreated illness, my father’s imprisonment, and my mother’s kneeling on broken glass. The few lines I produced were superficial and lifeless. I was not happy with them. Then, in 1988, my mother came to London to stay with me. This was her first trip abroad. I wanted her to enjoy herself thoroughly, and spent much time taking her out. After a short while, I noticed she was not having the time of her life. Something


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Wild Swans


FUTURITY


Woody Sez


PAINTING BY MARK THOMAS


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