l-r Shiong-en Chan, Danielle Desormeaux (photo by: Ange J. Murphy)
Head and Heart
by Caitlin Murphy
April has been quite the news month for stories that challenge our ideas about responsibility, consequence and our capacity for change. Playing now at the Centaur Theatre, Thinking of Yu, written by Carole Frechette, directed by Micheline Chevrier, and produced by Imago Theatre, offers up another.
The play’s starting point, as well as Frechette’s for writing it, is a news article about the 2006 prison release of a Chinese journalist Yu Dongyue, sentenced to 17 years for throwing red paint at a portrait of Mao during the 1989 demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. Maggie, a middle-aged woman with a social-activist past, has recently moved, and finds herself lost in a sea of unpacked boxes and unclear ambitions. Stumbling across the article about Yu’s release, she becomes obsessed with his plight: the courage of his gesture, the severity of its consequence. Unable to focus on her translation work, or give due attention to her sometime ESL student, Lin, Maggie falls down a rabbit hole of research and speculation.
