Arts & Culture

What: Carried By the River
Where: Tarragon Theatre, 30 Bridgman Ave.
When: Now, until Sun., March 23
Highlight: Ting-Huan 挺歡 Christine Urquhart’s eclectic costume designs
Rating: NN (out of 5)
Why you should go: Some striking images in complex choreographic sequences

AMID THE RISING  popularity of genealogical services like 23andMe and AncestryDNA, I expect there will soon be a wave of plays about characters grappling with the complex emotions of learning that they were adopted. Without feeling the need to spit into a test tube, Diana Tso 曹楓 grounds her new play, Carried by the River, in a unique perspective on this kind of identity-compromising discovery by situating it in the rippling aftermath of China’s contentious one-child policy. This is the fourth major production by Red Snow Collective — its previous three also being written by Tso with direction and/or choreography by William Yong 楊漢源 — continuing their commitment to stories of East Asian history, mythology and diaspora.

The adventure begins when 19-year-old Chinese Canadian Kai (Honey Pham) finds out that her recently deceased mother (Shiong-En Chan) had been keeping a big secret: Kai had been given up as a baby by an unknown birth mother (Tai Wei Foo 符岱微). With cryptic encouragement from a veritable menagerie of chatty animal guides, Kai travels to China with the hopes of finding her biological kin and reconnecting with her roots. As luck would have it, immediately upon arrival she meets and develops a fast friendship with a 20-something beauty-product seller named Ting Ting (Michelle Wang) who might just turn out to be Kai’s long-lost sister.

If that chance encounter seems like too much of a coincidence within minutes of Kai setting foot in a famously overpopulated country, the plot tries its best to soothe incredulous spectators with allusions to serendipitous red threads that connect and pull people together. For those still unsatisfied by that explanation, there’s a worthwhile twist that comes later, which is better left unspoiled. Though, personally, I’d have preferred if that subversion had been forecasted a little more acutely before it finally arrived. Doing so may have heightened the eventual revelation’s impact and left more time in the play’s concluding scenes to fully explore its implications. There’s definitely room to economize the script, much of which is cluttered with a few too many instances of characters explaining various Chinese symbols’ meanings to one another. For a piece so invested in the imagery of a rushing river, I wish the dialogue felt a little less wooden.

The production manages to find its moments of fluidity whenever Yong flexes his choreographic bona fides. Complex movement sequences offer glimmers of beauty and excitement, often featuring evocative shadow play in harmony with Andre du Toit’s precise lighting design. Though these are largely presented as interludes between rather static scenes of dialogue, and the production lacks a sense of cohesion that would make them feel naturally integrated into a more holistic vision.

The all-female/-non-binary cast does a solid job of soldiering onward through these limitations. Pham carries the river admirably; their interpretation of Kai evidently begins the story stuck in the “anger” stage of grief, occasionally letting the flashes of joy and sadness crack her tough exoskeleton as the journey unfolds. Wang does a fine job keeping Ting Ting vibrant, with a plucky attitude that always makes her fun to watch. This being Wang’s professional theatrical debut, her standout performance promises great things to come from her burgeoning career. But the real scene-stealer is the grandmotherly Brenda Kamino as a jaded spiritual medium who’s grown bored with her psychic ability to commune between metaphysical planes.

And, goodness, the costumes! Ting-Huan 挺歡 Christine Urquhart brought her A-game to designing the animal spirits, pulling together creative mascot-like habiliments with an endearingly homemade quality. An additional shoutout must go to the costume builder, Acadia Walsh, for resourcefully sourcing materials in the execution of Urquhart’s designs. Even the human characters made a staggering amount of costume changes, especially with Ting Ting’s parade of statement-making outfits letting her fashionista sensibility shine.

Unfortunately, the performance I attended appeared to be encumbered by some minor technical hiccups. Bookending episodes of on-stage livestreaming became off-centre from the projector’s presumed target, obfuscating the image they were trying to share. This will hopefully be sorted as the run goes on, but it begs the question of whether this fallible technology is even necessary. All the projection really does is enlarge Kai’s face, which is already sufficiently visible thanks to the Tarragon Extraspace’s intimate audience proximity. More amusingly, during one of the movement pieces in which the red string metaphor is literalized, the thread broke, accidentally signifying the opposite of the symbolic connectivity it was meant to embody. I’m not trying to be too hard on the team for these minor issues; accidents are, after all, part of the magic of live theatre, and the cast did a fine job of rolling with the impediments as they arose.

Watching the performance, I couldn’t decide whether this production’s budget was too low or too high. It’s clearly well-resourced, but also somewhat questionable how those resources were unevenly allocated. There’s a great deal of potential in both Tso’s script and Yong’s staging, but as it currently stands, this iteration seems like a proof of concept for a more polished version still to come. I’ll be curious to see what else may be waiting around the riverbend.