The Pacific Festival will be as much about building and embracing a vibrant Chinese theatre program at Gateway Theatre as it will be about good theatre.
For theatre director Jovanni Sy, the festival’s second year at Gateway will be bigger and better, and thus more capable of bringing together different cultures from within the city — a major goal of his.
“It’s the cornerstone of a broad artistic vision whereby we, the Gateway Theatre, try to connect more with the community of Richmond. We already have a loyal and dedicated group of patrons who love the work we do in English and our signature series, but this is a means to build bridges with those who may not be as familiar with us. We want the Chinese community to come to the theatre. We want them to be in our future audience,” said Sy.
The Pacific Festival will be a 13-day, four-weekend theatre event this September featuring four plays in Cantonese with Mandarin and English surtitles.
With Richmond’s tremendous Chinese immigrant population, Sy wants to bring the theatre cultures together, beneath one roof.
He said the festival aims to attract new Chinese immigrants who may not know about the theatre. In turn, bringing them in will make them more familiar with the theatre’s mainstream productions. As well, the festival offers non-Chinese theatregoers the chance to cross the Pacific without flying to Hong Kong.
The festival, he says, is the laying of a foundation whereby Gateway, once it reaches a broader audience, can begin to consider producing Chinese plays or translating local, English (or Canadian) ones into Chinese.
So far, Sy has only been able to import such plays. The main play is Tuesdays with Morrie, which is actually an American autobiographical story of a sports journalist and his former college professor who is diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease.
The audience will be able to witness how the play is portrayed in Hong Kong, with renowned Hong Kong pioneer actor and TV producer Dr. Chung King Fai.
Former Gateway director Simon Johnston, now a semi-retired theatre consultant, called the festival a “wonderful idea.”
“There’s a need to attract audiences from all parts of a community. Jovanni is trying to figure out where the new community is,” he said. Johnston likens the festival to going to see a foreign film in a theatre.
Festival producer Esther Ho said Tuesdays with Morrie, which is the closing play, will be a special treat given Chung’s high profile in the Hong Kong community.
“He is the master of drama theatre in Hong Kong and on the boards of lots of theatre groups. He’s also on lots of TV shows. Even close to 80 years old he is passionate and still doing teaching,” said Ho.
There will be four plays, all with different “experiences,” said Ho.
Cook Your Life is a comedic solo show and Dry MeChat is a provocative look at modern-day cyber living in the new age of the Internet.
Finally, the opening play will be staged outside and should draw some familiar parallels between Richmond and Hong Kong.
Will to Build is a verbatum theatre piece (the script is transcripts from real people) about development and Hong Kong’s urban heritage.
“Development is a hot topic button in both Hong Kong and in Richmond and their take on it is very unique because they talk to everybody; they’re not presenting a point of view, they’re presenting multiple points of view; the people doing the building, the people doing the buying and the people who may be displaced by it,” said Sy.
Tickets are $40 for adults with group and multiple-ticket discounts.
