“If we’re doing a play about Mao, to a 21st-century American audience,” says Mike, a character in Christopher Chen’s The Hundred Flowers Project, “then we should assume they don’t know any Chinese history.” OK, let’s assume that. Here are three events you’ll need to know about if you’re going to keep up with Chen’s frantic, flawed, wildly ambitious piece of work, running now at Silk Road Rising in a version directed by Joanie Schultz:
Next Mao launched an industrialization effort that was supposed to bring exponential advances in the production of steel and food. Unfortunately, he was an appalling ignoramus when it came to steel, and the people who might’ve enlightened him had been silenced during the Hundred Flowers campaign. Believing that usable metal could be smelted by amateurs working with scavenged scrap, he ordered the rural masses to build forges in their backyards. Then he set ridiculously high quotas for them, forcing them not only to melt down their own housewares but also to ignore their crops (which were being eaten by a wave of locusts, as it happened). Millions starved.
It looks at first like Chen is out to satirize the false egalitarianism and faddishness of devised theater. And to some extent he is. The ensemble clearly regard it as revisionist backsliding, for instance, when Julie naively asks why they can’t add a character—a journalist, say—for the audience to identify with.
Through 11/23: Thu 7:30 PM, Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 4 PM Silk Road Rising 77 W. Washington 312-857-1234, ext. 201silkroadrising.org $17.50-$35
