An interview with playwright David Yee and director Nina Lee Aquino about their play about the Indian Ocean tsunami
By Alena Khabibullina
Special to The Dialog
John Ng and Eponine Lee in Carried Away on the Crest of a Wave. Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann
It’s takes a lot of talent to convey tragic messages through art. Decent theatre provides the public with not “bread and circuses” but the feeling of personal participation in the event that they are carried away on the crest of theatrical experience.
The flooded stage of Tarragon Theatre was the scene for ripples of heartbreaking tragedy about the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.
Having their own sorrowful experience in such kind of natural disasters, the creative team: acclaimed playwright-in-residence David Yee and director Nina Lee Aquino, externalized it at the stage of one of Canada’s most important arts institutions.
This solid tandem team, working together since 2003, was exited to share the feelings about their first big production.
Alena Khabibullina / The Dialog: What the play is all about?
David Yee: It’s a huge container of short episodes where the connecting factor is the tsunami that became one of the top ten natural disasters in the reported history. The stories are correlated in the number of different ways. But there all are very different connections. They are wildly kind of desperate stories but they all get you back to the tsunami somehow.
Nina Lee Aquino: Whether or not some of the stories are more evident in their connections, their parallels. That’s the point. Even though this tsunami only happened in one part of the world it affected the entire world. It’s not chronological, it’s not linear. It happens from one place to another.
What inspired you for this play? Do you have your own connection to this natural disaster?
DY: I did have connection to 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. I knew people from there and I was talking to a friend of mine who was in one of the hospitals. So, yes, it was my correlation with it initially and then I just kept it off in my life until I figured out that the best way to sort out what just to write about it.
NLA: I do know what it’s like because I’ve lived in the third world country, in the Philippines. I’ve been in floods and I know what water rising feels like. I’ve seen it in my own community when I was there. I know what the consequences look like after a big flood, I had many of my relatives struggling on top of the roofs of their houses as a water rose …feeling hopeless. I lived in the country where disasters are part of our lives.
What was your first feeling of the play when David showed it to you?
NLA: I thought it was crazy, I thought it was beautiful and terrified. As anything with a David Yee play, all these ingredients, it’s perfect, it’s magical, and it’s theatrical! It has a musicality to it that I immediately connected to regardless of what the topic was. But I knew that because of David Yee the topic was going to be extraordinary. That’s just his writing, which I was always attracted to and am always a big fan regardless whether I am directing it or not.
Tell us more about your creative tandem.
NLA: This play is definitely a growth birth in our relationships as a Director – Playwright. It’s amazing and I am glad that Tarragon gave us this opportunity to grow together again. Hopefully it will grow more! It’s just a collaboration that works for us, a partnership in the writing and how movement and sound go together to meet choreography. His words and my direction, I find just really go together. We’ve been together since 2003. The start of my career was defined by David Yee plays, from small to this; this is the biggest one I’ve handled so far.
What is the main message you want to deliver to the audience?
DY: The thing that I do want people to take away is a sense of wonder. Because it happened so far away and to people who are not recognizable necessarily by North American standards. There is still a sense of connection and that we are a great deal closer with the life that we live.
NLA: The same thing for me, because I think we are all ultimately connected. Sometimes it’s in the catastrophe, natural disasters that sometimes evident how small the world is. Something so far away, but the water can still reach us in some way. Everything has consequences. So whatever happened over there, still small as it is, caused changes and shifts to happen in our lives whether we know it or not.
Who are your audience and why the play is worth seeing for students?
NLA: I think that our audience target usually the people who come to see the David Yee play, or David Yee and Nina Lee Aquino production, usually they are younger audiences. I think the sense of humor, the power, the simplicity of the messages quiet immediate and live. And the staff that David Yee presents, the issues, the possible answers and the questions are visual and relatable. Our impact on younger people is much stronger because in our work we talk about action, we present questions, we talk about solutions and it resonates with our younger audiences.
DY: We like questions on the theatre; we don’t like spoon feeding things. We want them to figure out things and be engaged by work and become a part of it. The play is global and the generation of students is growing up in a very interconnected world. They take a personal experience and what happened to a larger worldview, they can get it better than other audiences.
Carried away on the crest of wave is playing at Tarragon Theatre (30 Bridgman Avenue) until May 26, 2013. Don’t forget your student ID for a discount.
