2 Chinese Dramas (and a Family of 3) Broaden a Theater Festival’s Scope

For 35 years, the Shaw Festival had one central criterion for its programming: Any and all plays had to have been written during George Bernard Shaw’s lifetime.

This is not as confining as it sounds. Shaw, after all, was born in 1856 — when Abraham Lincoln was still an Illinois lawyer — and died a few months after Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” hit the comics pages in 1950.

Nonetheless, two of the festival’s nine productions this season fall well before that time period. “The Orphan of Chao” and “Snow in Midsummer” are adaptations of perhaps the two best-known plays from the Yuan period of classical Chinese drama, which stretched from 1279 to 1368.

“To twin ‘Orphan’ with ‘Snow’ gives our audience the chance to see two very different approaches to legendary material,” said Tim Carroll, the Shaw Festival’s artistic director. “Both pieces, in very different ways, allow the past to smash its way into the modern world.”

At the center of this confluence is Nina Lee Aquino, one of the most significant figures in Canadian theater. The festival not only enlisted Aquino to direct “Snow” (her debut there), but also cast her husband, Richard Lee, an actor and fight director, and their 17-year-old actress daughter, Eponine Lee, in both plays.