Silk Road Theatre Project

Interviewer: And so now, back to… the number of Tutsis killed by the Hutus in Rwanda.

Iris Chang: Around 800,000

Interviewer: The number of Huguenots killed in the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre.

Iris Chang: Around 70,000.

Interviewer: The number of children under 5 that die from Asthma in the United States.

Iris Chang: Around 100.

Interviewer: The price of a package of chicken breasts at Safeway.

Iris Chang: $3.50 for a package of 3.

Despite the irony of the excerpt above the tragic death of author Iris Chang, explored in Christopher Chen’s play “Into the Numbers,” is far from humorous. Last night we began work on the staged reading, which will have public performances later this week. Though the first few moments of rehearsal were filled with smiles and embraces – exclamations of “I haven’t seen you in so long!” and “how did your show go?” – the mood shifted as soon as we began to read.

The play goes inside Iris Chang’s mind in the last days before her death by suicide in 2005. In an article that appeared this week in the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette, Chen said of the play, “I made it more of a fantasy than real biography. I kind of go along with the idea that she was trying to wrestle with the unknown, the unthinkable…” That struggle leads Iris into what our sound designer, Stephen Ptacek, described as a “vortex” of her mental illness and the horror of the genocides she had been researching.

As shown in this image the structure of a vortex is bigger at the top – the circumference wider – and narrows over distance to a single point. Ptacek and Jennifer Shin, who is playing Iris in the reading, riffed on the idea that early in Chang’s career, when she was first conducting research for her bestselling book, The Rape of Nanking, the “cycles” between her times of clarity and her times of mental illness (Chang suffered from bipolar disorder) were longer. As the pressure of her job mounted, and the horrors she was discovering grew, she cycled faster and faster, until she was alone at the base of the vortex. Even the structure of the text spirals to a point, leaving the character of Iris spelling “bayoneted them” one letter at a time as the interviewer counts down the minutes to her death.

The team is rounded out by director Joanie Schultz, cast members Yosh Hayashi, Devorah Richards, Erik Kaiko and Brent Barnes, dramaturg Jen Shook, and stage manager Kefah Crowley. Performances are Dec. 6 at 8pm and Dec. 7 at 1pm in the Silk Road space at the Chicago Temple.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 at 1:45 pm and is filed under Events, Staged Readings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.