"Wheelock’s ‘Mountain’ a vivid adaptation" -states the Boston Globe!

The Boston Globe: Friday April 18

Wheelock’s ‘Mountain’ a vivid adaptation

By Terry Byrne

Grace Lin’s captivating “Where the Mountain Meets the Moon” is a potent blend of fantasy, Chinese folklore, and heroic adventure. On the Wheelock Family Theatre stage, the book’s theatrical adaptation combines vivid imagery with simple storytelling for an enchanting journey from Fruitless Mountain to the village of Bright Moonlight and back again.

Lin’s chapter book, which is geared to readers ages 8 to 12, weaves multiple traditional Chinese themes and characters into the main story line, which focuses on young Minli (Caroline Workman) and her quest to improve her family’s fortune. While managing all of the stories might create staging challenges, director Jane Staab and her production team make some very low-tech choices that have a powerful dramatic impact.

Choreographer Laurel Conrad and costume designer Melissa Miller collaborate on particularly winning costumes and movement that suggest the wind and rain and a silvery and graceful Old Man of the Moon, not to mention a greedy pack of monkeys.

Adapter Jeannine Coulombe uses selective narration to link the different stories, and Staab takes advantage of the opportunity to position various members of her ensemble in different areas of the stage to deliver key transitions and bits of exposition. The effect is one of constant movement, making it easy for the audience to follow Minli from her desperately poor home to the sky where the Jade Dragon and her children control the rain.

At the heart of “Where the Mountain Meets the Moon” is the power of storytelling. The play opens with children gathering around a storyteller, asking for the chance to play different roles in the tales. The storyteller soon morphs into Minli’s father, Ba (Michael Tow), whose tales feed Minli’s imagination even when there’s little rice to feed the family.

Minli’s Ma (Grace Napier) scoffs at Ba’s impractical stories and bemoans the family’s lack of money, inspiring Minli to spend one of the only two coins she has on a goldfish the seller promises will bring good fortune.

Following the fish’s instructions, Minli heads out on a quest to find the Old Man of the Moon who knows the secret of good fortune and ties everyone’s destiny together with string. Along the way, Minli meets a variety of characters, including an orphan boy (Sebastian Wood), a vindictive Magistrate Tiger (Bill Mootos), and most importantly, a flightless dragon (Stewart Evan Smith) who becomes Minli’s ally and best friend.

While the collection of folk tales spans time and space, and the parade of characters can feel a bit confusing at times, especially for the younger audience members, Workman and Smith’s chemistry helps to keep the audience focused. As the flightless dragon, Smith is endlessly enthusiastic, giggling with delight at whatever he and Minli encounter, and the friendship between the young girl and the dragon unfolds naturally and believably.

Matthew T. Lazure’s tiered moonlit set and Dewey Dellay’s atmospheric music help make the many transitions easy to follow.

While the book focused primarily on Minli’s quest, the stage adaptation opens up to the many people whose lives Minli touches. “Where the Mountain Meets the Moon” celebrates the importance of family, from Ma and Ba to the larger communities Minli encounters.

Terry Byrne can be reached at trbyrne@aol.com.

Caroline Workman as Minli and Stewart Evan Smith as the flightless dragon in “Where the Mountain Meets the Moon” at Wheelock Family Theatre.

 

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon in the Boston Globe

In ‘Mountain,’ a girl’s quest, and an author’s

By Joel Brown  Globe Correspondent   April 10, 2014

 

As a girl in upstate New York, Grace Lin rejected her Chinese heritage.

“There were no other Asian or minority families that lived in the area,” says Lin, whose parents emigrated from Taiwan. “I kind of decided early on that I was just going to pretend that I wasn’t Chinese. I was going to pretend that I was Caucasian, like everybody was in my class. I did such a good job of that that I really did forget most of the time that I was Chinese. I used to walk down the street and see my reflection in a store window and be like, ‘Oh, there’s a Chinese girl. Wait, that’s me.’ ”

Growing up in Cambridge years later, Caroline Workman embraced her own mother’s Chinese heritage. And one of her favorite books was “Where the Mountain Meets the Moon,” a novel for young readers based on Chinese folk tales, written and illustrated . . . by Grace Lin.

It all comes full circle beginning Friday, when Workman, 14, stars in a stage adaptation of “Where the Mountain Meets the Moon” at Wheelock Family Theatre, a New England premiere that runs through May 11.

“I loved the story, and I was so excited to see what it would look like onstage, whether I was in it or not,” says Workman.

Lin will spend much of this weekend at Wheelock, where she will receive the Wheel Award for commitment to children and families and changing lives through art. “It’s a really neat thing,” says Lin, who counts 15 books in print that she both wrote and illustrated, “because you spend so much time alone in your studio or your writing room, and you kind of put your work out into the universe and you don’t really know if it goes anywhere.

“And then to know there’s a whole production being made of something that came from nothing, that just came from your imagination, is a really cool feeling,” says Lin, who moved from Somerville to Northampton last year.

The book and play tell the story of a girl named Minli (played by Workman) who, inspired by her father’s folk tales, sets off on an adventure-filled quest to find the Old Man of the Moon and ask him how she can change her family’s fortunes.

“What she learns on the journey is: The good fortune we seek to begin with isn’t the good fortune we find, but we do find what really matters,” says director Jane Staab.

“I love that Minli is so kind and so smart,” says Workman. “She puts the puzzle pieces together, and she thinks of what to do to go over an obstacle. She’s so quick-witted.”

Lin says she used to get angry when her parents tried to teach her about Chinese culture “because I felt like all they were trying to do was remind me how different I was from my classmates.” But eventually she changed her mind, and “Where the Mountain Meets the Moon” in part resulted from one of her mother’s early efforts to connect her to her roots.

“One day she went out and got about six to 12 Chinese fairy tale books that had been translated to English, and she put them on the bookshelf in the living room and just left them there. She knew if she gave them to me I’d get mad.

“She was really smart. I did end up reading every single one of them,” Lin says. “But I remember feeling like these books weren’t that great. The translation was kind of rough, there wasn’t a lot of detail, everything was kind of flat, and the illustrations were really kind of crude. I think it kind of reinforced the idea that my Asian heritage was kind of inferior to these Western things, like ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Cinderella.’ ”

Many years later, she regretted not knowing more about her heritage and spent a lot of time trying to recapture what she had missed, including travels to China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. “All of a sudden those fairy tales came back to me. I’d see them in the landscape around me.”

She started making up her own stories about them, and “Where the Mountain Meets the Moon,” published in 2009, was the end result. Workman and her mother attended Lin book signings, and a print of Lin’s art hangs in Workman’s room.

“Where the Mountain Meets the Moon” will be Staab’s last show at Wheelock, at least for a while. After 33 years at the theater, as cofounder, casting director, business manager and artistic director, she is retiring in June. Going forward, the theater will be run by producer Wendy Lement and assistant producer Shelley Bolman, who have been in their jobs since Staab’s cofounder Susan Kosoff retired in 2012.

“There’s no particular reason, it’s just I turned 70, you know?” says Staab. “But I don’t believe I’m done with the creative side of my life. I sure hope not.”

Workman is a busy young actor and dancer whose resume includes a stint in “Billy Elliot” on Broadway. She says she’s excited to work once again with Staab, who also acted in or directed the other three shows she’s been in at Wheelock.

“Caroline is a special talent. We’ve seen her grow up in this theater,” Staab says. “I think we’ve brought her and her acting to a place she can be thrilled with.”

To this day, Lin says, she doesn’t speak Chinese well and cannot write it. Workman, though, is excited for next fall when she’ll be a freshman at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, where one of her classes will be Mandarin Chinese.

Joel Brown can be reached at jbnbpt@gmail.com.

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon rehearsal photos

Pictured: Caroline Workman plays Minli, Stewart Evan Smith is the Dragon, Chip Phillips is the Old Man of the Moon. Bottom photo: Director Jane Staab and choreographer Laurel Conrad work the performers through their paces.