How does one score the music for a play based on the life of the most notorious woman in modern China? A thorough knowledge of Eastern and Western musical idioms is essential. It also helps to be familiar with the contorted politics of the Chinese Communist Party. But for emotional realism, having lived through the turmoil instigated partly by the protagonist of Madame Mao’s Memories is a big plus. “I remember the excitement and paranoia of the time,” says 33-year-old Shanghai-born Evan Chen, the composer for Bailiwick Repertory’s new production and a survivor of one of our century’s most tumultuous and least explicable uprisings. “I participated in rallies, and I had to write confessions denouncing my father in order to keep my family out of trouble,” he says. “He was sent to jail, but he forgave me later. We all understood that was the only way to keep the rest of us from being classified as ‘class enemies.’”
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Being out of the limelight, one can imagine, was not Jiang’s style. After her husband and his followers “liberated” mainland China, she became restless–like Ibsen’s Nora, a role she had portrayed back in her Shanghai days. Her opportunity came in 1966, when, with Mao’s tacit encouragement, she launched the Cultural Revolution to weed out his opponents. In speech after speech she exhorted the masses to rekindle their revolutionary zeal, to overturn the bureaucracy. Her allies all over China organized the Red Guard, school-age children whose allegiance was only to the “great helmsman.”
Shortly after Mao’s death in 1976, Jiang lost the power struggle and was arrested along with the other members of the Gang of Four. She remained defiantly unrepentant. At her trial three years later she gave the greatest performance of her career, declaring the proceedings a sham rigged by her enemies and ex-victims. Today, with her death sentence suspended, she’s under house arrest, reportedly busy making dolls and apparently dying of throat cancer.
Like many of his compatriots, Chen suffered intense hardship during the 70s, but he claims to have no hatred for Madame Mao–only pity. He’s glad to be out of China. “I’m in an environment where I can do what I want–free to speak out. And I say the communist government has always been repressive–Jiang was only an instrument,” he exclaims, in English that’s surprisingly colloquial for someone who’s been in this country only six years. Determination seems to come naturally to this wiry man who wears his luxuriant hair shoulder length, a practice almost unthinkable in his native land. While in his teens, he picked up rudimentary English by listening to the Voice of America. He also mastered enough Greek to marry an exchange scholar from Greece. “That was probably the only way I could get out of China,” he says.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Steven D. Arazmus.
