Exploring his Chinese identity via the Greeks
When director Ravi Jain approached Jeff Ho two years ago to play Ophelia in his production Prince Hamlet, it was to address a pressing need: The actor originally cast in the role, Kawa Ada, had broken his leg and rehearsals were soon to start.
Jain explained to Ho that casting a male actor in this traditionally female role was part of his particular approach to Shakespeare’s iconic play: “We talked about how it’s an examination of who gets to tell the story,” Ho says. “This sort of mythic play in our canon. And that ability, race and gender were a huge part of that exploration.”
Ho got on board, joining a cast that included a female Hamlet (Christine Horne), Black female actors playing Gertrude (Karen Robinson) and Laertes (Khadijah Roberts-Abdullah), and the deaf female actor Dawn Jani Birley playing Horatio. After great reviews and a sellout, Jain’s company Why Not Theatre has remounted Prince Hamlet for a nationwide tour that opens at Canadian Stage this week, after playing in Banff and Vancouver (and en route to Ottawa).
So it’s true that his joining Prince Hamlet was to some extent, as Ho puts it, “the greatest fluke ever.” But it’s also the case that the questions that Jain is asking — about the relevance of classic Western drama to 21st-century Canada — were ones in which Ho was already deeply entrenched in his burgeoning parallel career as a playwright.
On the same night in January that Prince Hamlet played in Banff, Ho’s play Iphigenia and the Furies — an adaptation of Euripides’ Iphigenia Among the Taurians — opened at Toronto’s Aki Studio. In April, Ho’s new version of another Greek tragedy, Antigone, pre- mieres at Young People’s Theatre.
I sat down with Ho last week to find out how his dual professional identities fit together. He gravitates toward the Greek tragedies, he says, because they were his first experience of theatre: He was in a production of Oedipus Rex in Grade 9 at Unionville High School in Markham, only a few years after his family immigrated to Canada from Hong Kong. Ho says he’s “obsessed” with the Greek classics, but they also make him feel “uncomfortable” because he’s not sure how to square them with his cultural heritage.
“Every time my mother tells me stories now, our ancient Chinese stories, my first reference point is the Greeks,” Ho says. “Which says a lot about how I’ve been educated, how I’ve been colonized in my education so that my first reference point is to these giant emotions and stories.”
Adapting the Greeks is a sort of reverse-engineering project to “use these stories to decolonize myself,” he says.
This meant, in the case of Iphigenia and the Furies, switching the focus of the play’s ending to its chorus — in his version a single character — who has precious cultural artifacts taken from her when Iphigenia and her brother Orestes return to Greece. Ho found himself objecting to Euripides’ text because “it made the Indigenous people look barbaric and foolish … I thought, ‘I can’t perpetuate this.’ It’s a story that holds on its own and will be told again through the operas (Gluck and Handel, amongst others, have adapted Iphigenia Among the Taurians) … I said, ‘Why must we keep going on like this, again and again?’ ”
Ho has been working on his Antigone for three years, following from an invitation from Young People’s Theatre to write an adaptation. His version is inspired by the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising (its title includes a Chinese character that stands for “square”), the 2014 umbrella protests in Hong Kong and more recent repression of minority populations in China.
Ho’s first play, trace, was autobiographical, telling stories of his ancestors and his personal journey — a saga that involves him running away from home at 18 and finding a berth in the highly competitive acting program at Montreal’s National Theatre School.
The relationship of his ongoing life story to the classic texts he’s engaging with is fraught. “What is my responsibility? I have friends who still ask me, ‘When are you going to write your next Chinese play?’ ” Ho says. “But isn’t everything I pen technically also Chinese in its core, in some way?” Underlining this ancestry, Ho writes using his Chinese name, Ho Ka Kei.
Ho’s success as a writer and performer is part of the increased presence of artists from many different Asian backgrounds in Canadian theatre, including but not limited to Nina Lee Aquino, Marjorie Chan, Ins Choi, Hong Kong Exile, Matt Miwa and Julie Tamiko Manning, Janice Jo Lee, Njo Kong Kie, Minh Ly, Diana Tso, David Yee, and the young writers and performers in fu-GEN Theatre’s recent double bill of Vietnamese-Canadian works. “What’s so exciting about that list,” Ho says, “is how diverse our work is.”
This mirrors and contributes to the major surge of representation and visibility for Asian-American and Asian-Canadian artists in mainstream TV and film. Beyond this being the year of the Asian man — as a recent Star story asserts — Ho says it’s the “year of Asian representation” more broadly, pointing to Sandra Oh’s recent Golden Globe and SAG awards.
As much as he celebrates the success of actors Simu Liu ( Kim’s Convenience) and Henry Golding ( Crazy Rich Asians) as leading men, Ho insists on holding space for the “queer Asian men that I identify with.” This brings us back to Ho playing Ophelia, which he says is about a “reclamation of power,” something directly connected to his heritage: “I look back to Chinese history in Peking opera,” in which star male performers played female roles throughout their careers. “There is that tradition to draw from; that is a source of strength … I recognize my femininity and I prize it.”
Prince Hamlet plays at the Berkeley Street Theatre, 26 Berkeley St., through Feb. 24. See canadianstage.com and 416-368-3110.
Antigone plays at Young People’s Theatre April 29 to May 16. See youngpeoplestheatre.ca and 416-8622222.
Karen Fricker is a Toronto-based theatre critic and a freelance contributor for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @KarenFricker2
Ho’s success as a writer and performer is part of the increased presence of artists from many different Asian backgrounds in Canadian theatre