Guest Blogger: Donald Woo

Wong's Garden and Donald Woo's Personal Ghost

It’s late at night and as I’m figuratively spinning a bunch of plates I’ve roughly labeled ‘plot’ and ‘character’ in order to get this draft of Wong’s Garden ready for the next workshop, I’ve got some chicken in black bean sauce cooking in the background and I’m checking the time to see when I should be giving my loved one a wake-up call since she’s in another time zone right now.

I’m busy writing a play that should be in an Artistic Director’s recycle bin: it’s well over two hours long, the action is divided into three acts with no scene breaks and everything takes place in a living room within the span of under 24 hours. Most people who’ve ever written a play like this are dead and here I am, very much alive, losing sleep over this piece I’m dying to ‘get right’.

And who’s looking over my shoulder while I do this? A ghost. He’s been dead since 1938 but he does make the odd appearance in my life. I used to have entire conversations with him in 2000 and into 2001 and he never quite leaves my side. Now before you think I’ve gone completely off the deep end (and you might not be entirely wrong), Ödön von Horváth has been a great source of inspiration for me since I was introduced to him in 1997 by my acting teacher, Joel Miller, while I drifted through the Concordia University Theatre Program.

Ödön’s plays are an Artistic Director’s nightmare: they’re too long, they have too many characters and even though the dramatic action is always tightly written, each scene and each line can be so dense so as to require a tremendous amount of energy and dramaturgical investigation to unpack.

Ödön looks on

I loved Ödön’s work from the beginning and when I found out a little bit more about this dead playwright, I really felt as if I’d found a kindred spirit. He was a linguistic and cultural mutt: Hungarian mother tongue, educated in German, grew up in Hungary, Slovakia, Austria and Germany, and he wrote exclusively in his second language: German. I have a French-Canadian mother and a Chinese father and having been educated in English in Quebec while living in a French speaking area while surrounded by second generation Italians at school, I didn’t feel like I belonged to very much either. There was an outsider quality to Ödön’s work that felt honest to me and as a non-separatist in Quebec in the 1990s, I also felt like my society had gone ape-shit with stupidity with me caught in the middle (although by no means nothing at all like what Ödön, and everyone else, experienced in 1930s Germany).

Ödön, like most thinking people from his time and place, was appalled at how the world around him was fast deteriorating into a society that would embrace National Socialism as a one-stop, multi-faceted solution to all their woes. Ödön could have written didactic polemics against the people who thrust forward the policies, he could have felt so angered by what was going on around him so as to cast off all art and to holler, through his writing, about the injustices and stupidity committed in the name of patriotism… but Ödön didn’t exactly do this. Instead, he wrote plays (and a few novels) with tightly written dramatic action with characters from his time and place who struggled to preserve their sense of dignity (often with appalling results). It may sound like the ‘easy way out’ to not stand on a soap box and denounce didactically, with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, what you know deep inside is wrong with the world and to instead do something as lazy as portraying people as people, no better and no worse than what they are, but it wasn’t easy at all: Ödön was chased all over Europe by German authorities, he had his books burned, and he would have been put into a concentration camp had he not died in a freakish accident in Paris in 1938 at the age of 36.

At this point, my chicken in black-bean sauce is cooked (and eaten!) and I’ve already called and woken up my loved one. I’m about to start a major rewrite of Act III of Wong’s Garden and my head is full with raising the stakes of my characters and preserving a logical unity of action while going for the jugular at every turn. And there’s Ödön, peering over my shoulder, his eyes piercing into my soul and he asks me “How do your characters preserve their sense of dignity?” I want to answer but Ödön doesn’t want an answer, it’s not that kind of question. “HOW DO YOUR CHARACTERS PRESERVE THEIR SENSE OF DIGNITY?”, he repeats. I don’t know how, Ödön, they just will because you and I know that no other choice exists. Ödön is silent for now. It’s time to rewrite Act III.