Lady Sunrise: Reimagining a Modern Chinese Spoken Drama Classic in Contemporary Canada

This article examines Lady Sunrise, Canadian playwright Marjorie Chan’s localized and contemporary rewriting of Sunrise (1936), a modern Chinese spoken drama classic, which premiered in February–March 2020 at Toronto’s Factory Theatre under the direction of Nina Lee Aquino. Chan has condensed the massive dialogue play of fifteen male and female characters in a modern Chinese city to mostly monologues by six Asian Canadian women in present-day Vancouver and Richmond. The author focuses on the play’s transformation in both content—from clash of the haves and have-nots of the 1930s’ China to contemporary racial, gender, and class conflicts in contemporary Canada—and form—from realistic dialogue drama to one relying predominantly on the monologue format, together with the implications of its all-female Asian cast and predominantly female creative team.