A Winter People

A Winter People, Chay Yew’s adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, is sexy, lyrical, and longing, cleverly folding the pieces of Anton Chekhov’s other masterworks to tell this ever-timely story. A middle-aged chanteuse, Madam Chia, returns from San Francisco in the spring of 1935 to her family estate in the heartland of China during the last days of the Nationalist Government. Amid dangerous flirtations and yearnings for people and lives of which they cannot keep hold, Chia and her daughters – Mei, who has lived her entire life managing the estate, Swee, who longs for escape from her marriage, and Liang, who finds solace in the ideology of Communism – confront the loss of their home, family and way of life. A portrait of the challenges of a family in transition, A Winter People is a poetic, haunting play.