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An Epic Set in Xenophobic Limbo: Huang Ruo’s Angel Island
From the walls of an immigrant detention cell to the opera stage.
You can count on suffering to supply stage music with heft, and Huang Ruo’s choral drama Angel Island mined a motherlode of the stuff in its inaugural run at BAM this past week. Equal parts requiem, oratorio, and manifesto, Angel Island tells the collective story of Chinese immigrants held at a notorious detention center in San Francisco Bay. And so he knows exactly how to handle the text’s pileup of pain and shame, the rough-hewn poems that mix laments (“Here several hundreds of my countrymen are like fish caught in a net”), metaphors of desolation (“The ocean encircles a lone peak / Rough terrain surrounds this prison”), and rage (“Alas, such tyranny of the White Race!”).
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