Winter wonderland Snow in June is a multicultural treat BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Snow in June Adapted and directed by Chen Shi-Zheng. Text by Charles L. Mee. Music by Paul Dresher. Set by Yi Li Ming. Costumes by Anita Yavich. Lighting by Rick Fisher. Sound by David Remedios. Music director Evan Harlan. With Qian Yi, David Patrick Kelly, Rob Campbell, and Thomas Derrah. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre at the Loeb Drama Center through December 28.

It’s said that revenge is a dish best eaten cold. In Snow in June, revenge is a veritable baked Alaska. In director Chen Shi-Zheng’s adaptation of a fourth-century Chinese legend first dramatized in the 13th-century and now transposed to America, a wrongly executed young woman prophesies that the injustice done her will prompt, among other cataclysms in Nature, winter precipitation in summer. At the American Repertory Theatre, where the work is in its world premiere, the audience enters to find the stage a foot deep in plastic snow through which actors trudge like human plows before a large, kitschy replica of a Chinese flower painting set on its ear. The evening ends in a snowblower-generated blizzard so ferocious that cast members have to be dug out of the snow to take their curtain calls. In between, there flows hot and cold running whimsy climaxed by 15 minutes of chilling purity borrowed from Chinese opera.

If Snow in June is not entirely successful in its blend of tragedy, comedy, and choreography, it nonetheless makes for an inventive, precisely executed 90 minutes in which East and West are thrown into the Cuisinart. The theater piece unites Chen, whose background is in Chinese opera, with the American playwright Charles L. Mee, who’s known for his collage-like riffs on classic drama, and the American composer Paul Dresher, who, picking up on the rural locale of the Chinese tale, sets it in American-roots styles ranging from C&W and bluegrass to Talking Heads (with Asian overtones and a hint of Piazzolla). The score, played live on a side stage by the quartet Andromeda and a percussionist, is eclectic and clever, bowing in the end to a long, gripping aria lifted straight from the 13th-century Chinese musicalization of the story; it’s sung by the show’s imported star, Qian Yi, who learned it while being trained in kunju at the Shanghai Opera School.

The story — which is told in flashback presided over by the ghost of the Girl, who moves through the proceedings at a quick, mincing glide — is simple and broadly performed, its message that good may be desirable but injustice is the norm. The Girl, we learn, was the impoverished ward of a wealthy Widow. When the older woman, an amusingly dowdy loan shark played by a man, is saved from an assault by an opportunistic father and son, the two men demand the two women’s hands in marriage. Although the older pair reach a comic-flirty rapprochement, the Girl refuses the Boy (who is played by ART stalwart Thomas Derrah as a lecherous redneck crossed with Popeye). When a murder plot he cooks up goes awry, the Girl is wrongly accused and executed. Whereupon, in a red-lit if snow-strewn finale, she takes a steely revenge. "Now you will see," Qian Yi sings in Chinese, "even though this is the month of June, it will snow without end, because the evil thing that has been done turns all the world upside down."

Given its grim view of human nature, Snow in June, as envisioned by Chen, is a comic fairy tale that, though its fearsome weather prognostication is in place from the beginning, turns tragic only in the end. Up to that point, despite the at-once sinister and touching presence of the ghost singing her tremulous tunes, the piece marries poetry and goofiness as much as it does East and West.

Designed to contrast splashes of color with the white snow and translucent plexiglass props, the movement-driven comedy features an ensemble of ART/MXAT Institute students as a phalanx of hangers-on dressed in glimmering ’50s country wear and brandishing white fiber-optic brooms — glimmering at the bristles — that feature in choreography that ranges from hootenanny to martial arts. Qian Yi’s character is delicately rendered, even in a number in which she spews a ditzy fantasy of love, but the other characters are presented as comic caricatures: Derrah striking macho poses as the Boy, Rob Campbell as his equally carnal bumpkin dad, and a marvelously timid and out-of-it David Patrick Kelly as the Widow. Campbell doubles as a callous Judge who explains the usefulness of torture while dashing around the stage on a plexiglass scooter; Kelly makes an appearance as a snake-oil Apothecary on a flashing bicycle, cataloguing his wares in a zippy bluegrass sales pitch.

Snow in June is something of a novelty but one characteristic of the eclectic, experimental collaboration that is becoming a trademark of ART under the regime of artistic director Robert Woodruff. Not everything that comes out of a melting pot is toothsome, of course. But this particular Chinese-American stew, even if its flavors don’t entirely blend, proves enjoyable and surprising. Half an hour later, I was still marveling.