Writer Madeleine Thien revisits her Chinatown opera libretto at Future Mythologies, November 25
Vancouver-set work, following the story of two men’s struggles during the Chinese Immigration Act, is a passion project for the award-winning author
IndieFest presents Future Mythologies on November 25 at the Annex
CELEBRATED AUTHOR Madeleine Thien couldn’t be happier to revisit her opera Chinatown, a project that stalled amid the pandemic. Her “passion project” is gaining new life, and moving a few steps more toward a full production at IndieFest this week, where the Future Mythologies debuts excerpts—after a last concert showing at City Opera.
“It has been really very meaningful,” Thien, whose stories and novels like Certainty and Do Not Say We Have Nothing have been translated into 25 languages, tells Stir. “I grew up outside of Chinatown in Strathcona and I went to elementary school there in the ‘80s, and at that time it was so vibrant, always full to the rafters, people triple parked. I would say I really didn’t know the history of it through the decades before we arrived.
“I had a new awakening to the lives of the men who were there in the decades before, who had no choice to have a family of their own and had no sons or daughters or grandchildren,” she continues. “We felt they had no voice and we wanted to tell the story for them as if we were their grandchildren—and do it in the most artful way possible….Everyone’s committed with their hearts and really wanted it to come to fruition.”
The opera—created by the team of Thien along with composer Alice Ping Yee Ho, translator Paul Yee, and dramaturg Marjorie Chan—is a love story that covers everything from the Head Tax to the Exclusion Act in its tale of two families and a chorus of ghosts. The music mixes Chinese and Western instruments, and Thien’s libretto interweaves English, Cantonese, and Hoisan.
Built during an extended workshop process over years at City Opera, it debuted in an opera-in-concert format in 2022. Thien says she learned a lot along the way, and has significantly reworked the structure debuting this week in a performance and talk, where the team shares text excerpts from their newly created second act. Thien says Vancouver Opera and re:Naisssance Opera’s Debi Wong have been supporting the project in the background—with everyone’s dream to see it have a full staging here and across the country.
As Mozart or Puccini could tell you, operas don’t happen overnight. And for Thien, this marks the first time she’s tackled a libretto—though it felt somewhat natural, she says, having grown up with a mother who loved to sing Chinese opera.
“I always had a strong sense of where I wanted to rework it,” Thien explains. “I decided to completely rewrite Act 2, and that would require a huge musical rewriting of Act 2.
“Part of the challenge was I was coming to the libretto from novels, where I have so much room,” she reflects. “The libretto spans one person’s entire lifetime: 60 years. The first act spans several decades and the second act just a couple of days. For 23 years of the Exclusion Act, there were no Chinese allowed into Canada, so a lot of these men and labourers couldn’t bring their wives or children here, and Chinatown became largely a bachelor community. Then there was this sudden transformation when the community started to change, but also Chinatown came under pressure because of the city’s plans to demolish whole neighbourhoods. What I struggled with was: How am I going to bring in so many voices in a short amount of time and have them come to life almost immediately?”
Audiences will find out how the writer and her team have answered that question in a showing that joins other operas in progress, including Inferno, a hip-hop opera based on Dante’s Inferno by Omari Newton and Amy Lee Lavoie. For Thien, venturing into the operatic world has been inspiring: "I think I'm interested in almost every form of storytelling," she admits.
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