Results tagged “marjoriechan”

THEATRE: Last chance to catch Marjorie Chan’s The Madness of the Square at the Factory Theatre this afternoon. The historical drama follows four friends who become unlikely revolutionaries in the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations, and the Western journalism intern caught in the tragedy. The Cahoots Theatre Projects production is complicated and ambitious, complete with a Greek-style chorus and video projections of images from the actual event. Factory Theatre Mainspace (125 Bathurst Street), 2 p.m., P.W.Y.C.

Marjorie Chan's A Nanking Winter is a show about the 1937 genocide of the citizens of Nanking committed by the Japanese army. The atrocity, which claimed the lives of at least 300,000 Chinese, is an often-overlooked tragedy, and Chan's story focuses on a young woman named Irene who has written a book exposing the truth about the massacre. Chan's play is inspired by Iris Chang and her book The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, which was a best seller in 1997. Chang suffered from depression and, in 2004, she took her own life. The first act of A Nanking Winter is set in the home of Irene and her Japanese husband on the eve of her Rape of Nanking-esque book's release. She is visited by her flighty sister, her publisher, Julia, and a mysterious guest that Julia brings along. The second act thrusts the action back into the past and explores the lives of two women, both named Mei, struggling to survive in the middle of the Nanking massacre.