Carried away on the cres.., p.1
carried away on the crest of a wave, page 1
carried
away
on the
crest
of a
wave
David Yee
Playwrights Canada Press
Toronto
For D & A, and all who suffered and all who lost. And for those no longer among us.
Contents
Dedication
Foreword
Preface
Production History
Characters
The Leap Second Story
The Swimming Child Story
The Saint Story
The Radio Story
The Orphan Boy Story
The Water Story
The Falling Story
The Millimetre Story
The Vermin Story
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also By
Copyright
Preface
This is a play about hope.
The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami struck the coasts of fourteen countries spanning two continents over a period of twelve hours, beginning the morning of December 26th. It killed over 250,000 people from forty-six different countries, the deadliest tsunami in recorded history.
I have a friend who narrowly escaped while in Khao Lak, Thailand. In the days that followed, in the middle of the night, she would call me from the Thai hospital where she was convalescing. She’d recount to me what she was seeing, through a haze of painkillers, and those stories stuck with me long after she’d been discharged and returned home.
Over the course of five years, from 2007 to 2012, I read numerous accounts and conducted personal interviews with individuals and families who suffered tragic losses on that day, or who had miraculous stories of survival. . . sometimes both. An overwhelming number of them experienced moments of inexplicable coincidence, or profound intersection. Some of them even found hope. Not a single person I’ve spoken to has told me the story I’d expected to hear. The stories contained herein are not purely fiction, nor are they strictly fact. They are all, however, rooted in some common truth, shared experience or moment of unflinching honesty.
In 2011 I was at a conference in Xiamen, China, before heading to Thailand to do some first-hand research. While there, I wound up drinking with a Swedish girl I’d met at the conference. Mentioning sort of off-handedly where I was on my way to, she smiled knowingly and paused before saying, “I was there.” She had been in Khao Lak as well. In fact, she’d been in the same hotel as my friend, only a few rooms apart. That’s how small the world is.
From Patong Beach in Phuket you can see—very distinctly—the line along the coast where rebuilding has taken place. I wanted to take a picture, something detailed, but it was impossible to get the entirety of it in a single shot. If I walked farther back, I could see the whole landscape, but it was missing the detail, the sharpness I was looking for. Instead, I walked the perimeter of the line, taking several photographs that I could later edit together. It seemed a suitable metaphor for how I’d written the play.
It seemed impossible to sum up what happened on December 26, 2004, in a single narrative. Instead, carried away on the crest of a wave has an anthological structure: it’s several short plays in a single container. This, to me, was the only way to approach it, the only way to capture the enormity of it while preserving a trenchant insight. That being said, every small play was written in reference to and in service of the larger structure. There are connections inside, between stories and characters, across the history and geography of the play. Some are obvious, but most require some excavation. The original Toronto cast referred to them as “Easter eggs” in rehearsal, things they would discover that connected them to others, expanding the world radially. None of the stories in this play stand alone, though they might seem to at first. Everything is connected.
Finally, this is not a definitive account of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. There are so many stories that couldn’t make it in; they were too unwieldy or took the play, as a whole, too off course. It also hasn’t entirely finished happening yet. The tsunami set some events into motion which have yet to conclude. In December 2011, an Indonesian girl presumed dead found her way back to her village, seven years later, with only the vague memory of a café and one family member’s first name to guide her. She was eight years old when she disappeared and it’s still unclear how she survived or where she’d been for seven years. How many more, like her, are still out there?
This play contains nine stories. Stories about redemption, the impossibility of grief, loss, strange serendipity, brutality, sacrifice. . . but the play, as a whole, as the bottle these missives are preserved inside. . . this is a play about hope.
David Yee
Gold Coast, 2014
Foreword
In our hyper-wired world of today, with its twenty-four hour news cycle, tragedies spread across our screens and around the globe at the speed of light. But how many random acts of cruelty can our spirits process, or even truly remember? In carried away on the crest of a wave, the wildly talented young playwright David Yee slows time to examine one such disaster intimately: the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. The deadliest tsunami in recorded history, this disaster claimed roughly a quarter of a million lives, primarily in South and Southeast Asia. Yet, true to our times, even a catastrophe of this magnitude has receded from our memories, at least in North America, crowded out by a decade of more recent newsfeed items.
David Yee, however, refuses to let the many lives altered and destroyed drift into the recesses of our self-involved culture. An actor and playwright of Chinese and Scottish descent, born and raised in Toronto, Yee serves as the co-founding artistic director of fu-GEN, Canada’s only professional Asian Canadian theatre company. He therefore stands at the forefront of a rich and blossoming genre, whose origins many trace to Canadian R.A. Shiomi’s 1982 play Yellow Fever, which became a hit off-Broadway in New York and around the world. In 2010, Yee made a stunning playwriting debut with his full-length play lady in the red dress. Showcasing his exuberant theatricality and subversive intelligence, Yee mashed surrealism with mystery and genre elements to explore Canada’s anti-Asian racist history, as well as the present-day denial of that past. lady was shortlisted for Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award, marking the arrival of a major new theatrical voice.
carried away on the crest of a wave proves a brilliant follow-up to lady, demonstrating Yee’s literary versatility, as well as his innate humanism and spirituality. A firm believer in the importance of research, he prepared by meticulously digesting everything he could find on topics such as earthquakes, fault lines, and the disaster itself. True of the best authors, however, Yee never shows his homework. In fact, the actual catastrophe itself is never depicted, but instead becomes the impetus for Yee to explore its impact on the lives and souls forever changed by its fury. These spirits are an eclectic bunch, spread around the globe: a Muslim engineer and a Catholic priest, two Japanese men falling down a seemingly endless hole, a radio shock jock in Toronto, a seismologist who blames himself for the Tsunami deaths, two brothers swept out to sea; a single natural disaster, rippling outward from its source, eventually reaching these disparate individuals, binding them into an unexpected community.
David Yee’s wave therefore carries us to a wonderfully surprising place, where we glimpse the interconnectedness of all humanity. Perhaps his own vantage point, as a Western author of mixed-race Asian ancestry, gives him a unique perspective with which to appreciate a tragedy whose victims were overwhelmingly Asian. In any case, as a young author, Yee knows all too well how our screens and media hold sway over contemporary lives. Yet for that very reason, he continues to believe in the critical place of theatre and live performance in today’s culture. In carried away on the crest of a wave, David Yee demonstrates the power of art to succeed where the facts and footage of our twenty-four hour news cycle often fail: to make palpable a human tragedy, mark its stories indelibly upon our memories, and bind us together as citizens of the world.
David Henry Hwang
Brooklyn, NY, 2014
carried away on the crest of a wave was first produced by Tarragon Theatre in Toronto, Ontario, between April 24 and May 26, 2013. It featured the following cast and creative team:
Actors
Kawa Ada, Ash Knight, Eponine Lee, Richard Lee, John Ng, Mayko Nguyen and Richard Zeppieri
Director
Nina Lee Aquino
Assistant Director
Jenna Rodgers
Set and costume designer
Camellia Koo
Lighting designer
Michelle Ramsay
Sound designer
Michelle Bensimon
Stage manager
Joanna Barrotta
Assistant stage manager
Emilie Aubin
The play was first produced in the United States by the Hub Theatre in Fairfax, Virginia, between November 15 and December 8, 2013. It featured the fol
Actors
Nora Achrati, Rafael Sebastian Medina, Ryan Sellers, Andrew Ferlo, Ed Christian and Hedy Hosford
Director
Helen Pafumi
Scenic Designer
Robbie Hayes
Costume designer
Madeline Bowden
Lighting designer
Jimmy Lawlor
Sound designer and composer
Matthew Nielson
Props designer
Suzanne Maloney
Stage manager
William Pommerening
Characters
Beckett
Swimmer
Runner
Amal
Ma’mar
Rick
Chili
Sanjay
The Hard-boiled Man
Kid
Crumb
Jasmine
Makoto
Kintaro
Nguyen
Lenore
Vermin
Diego
The Leap Second Story
A press conference at the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, Australia. BECKETT, a scientist in a lab coat, enters. She has a tablet computer that she refers to as she presents. The reporter she shared a moment with earlier in her day is in the audience.
BECKETT
Ladies and gentlemen of the press.
Beat.
Especially gentlemen.
Beat.
Especially the gentleman in the blue coat who passed me in line earlier and brushed my shoulder and we both turned because a wave of electricity passed through us that was something like the feeling when you drink milk that’s gone off, only good, and neither of us spoke but I wanted to tell you that you are the handsomest man I think I’ve ever seen.
Beat.
Thank you for joining us.
She clears her throat.
People often ask me what it is we do at the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service. I think it’s rather self-explanatory, but that’s me. Over the years of being asked this question, I’ve simplified my explanation to the following statement: We observe.
This may blow your mind, but the earth changes speed and position constantly. Over the course of centuries the mean earth day has gotten longer, then shorter, then longer again. A number of factors are responsible for this. For instance:
On December 26, 2004, the earth’s mass was drawn towards its core via tectonic subduction and the planet got. . . smaller. Because the planet got smaller, it started to spin faster, three microseconds faster than before. The day got shorter. But the force also tilted the planet 2.5 centimetres on its axis. It wobbled. Like knocking a spinning top, the tidal shifts created a “drag” effect, slowing us back down. The day got longer. These differences in microseconds may seem infinitesimal at the moment. . . but they do add up.
We, as scientists, as observers of anomalous planetary behaviour, as record-keepers of the “big picture,” must account for these shifts and their impact on the future of our world. Like balancing a ledger, we—the accountants of time—have instituted necessary measures to maintain our pace with the earth. About every eighteen months, we add a leap second to Coordinated Universal Time. You aren’t aware of it. But it’s there. Inserted into the fabric of your day.
And by a marvel of science, a breakthrough in observatory technology that would take far longer to explain than we have tonight. . . for the first time ever, I can tell you what happened in that leap second. That fraction of a glimmer of the mere concept of a moment. You didn’t even notice it. Because you weren’t watching. But we were watching. And we wanted to let you all know. . . because if you know. . . then maybe we stand a chance after all. What happened in the leap second went something like this:
A balloon burst at a child’s birthday party.
A mosquito pierced the surface of my skin.
Twelve people laughed at the same joke.
A plane lifted from the ground.
Two strangers shared a glance across a crowded subway car.
A match was struck to light a cigarette.
You smiled at me.
A phone rang once.
A honeybee disappeared into thin air.
Six people standing together all experienced déjà vu.
My face flushed at the sight of you.
A supercomputer finished calculating the end of pi.
A grasshopper swallowed a garden snake.
The Internet crashed.
Every child alive stopped crying.
California caught on fire.
There was peace on earth.
We fell in love.
The world ended.
And we were all reborn.
BECKETT puts the tablet down. She steps off the stage and into the audience. She finds the reporter in the blue jacket she shared a moment with earlier in her day. She stands him up, and kisses him.
The Swimming Child Story
Malaysia. SWIMMER and RUNNER are in a house. The house is in the ocean. Water quickly fills the house, rising from the foundation. SWIMMER and RUNNER are scooping it out with large basins and tossing the water out the window into the ocean. SWIMMER is bleeding from his head.
SWIMMER
It’s too much!
RUNNER
Your head!
SWIMMER
What?
RUNNER
Your head, it’s bleeding.
SWIMMER
It’s nothing.
RUNNER
It’s a lot of blood.
SWIMMER
The head bleeds.
RUNNER
Everything bleeds.
SWIMMER
Not as much as the head.
RUNNER
How do you know?
SWIMMER
Do you remember last spring? Mother hit her head on the beam over there?
RUNNER
I don’t remember.
SWIMMER
I remember. We drove her to the hospital.
RUNNER
Impossible. We don’t have a car.
SWIMMER
We don’t?
RUNNER
You probably saw that on television.
Beat. They realize together.
BOTH
The television!
They run to the television in the centre of the room, lift it together and heave it out the window. They assess the water situation. Still sinking.
RUNNER
Not enough.
SWIMMER
The sky!
RUNNER
What about it?
Short beat.
SWIMMER
I don’t know.
RUNNER
Your head!
SWIMMER
It’s fine, shut up! We should throw the television table.
RUNNER
We may need it.
SWIMMER
We don’t have a television anymore.
RUNNER
We may need it as a raft.
SWIMMER
We may not need a raft if the house stops sinking.
RUNNER
Stop arguing with me!
SWIMMER
Stop making stupid suggestions.
RUNNER
Just find more things to throw.
SWIMMER grabs a trophy off the floor.
