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    carried away on the crest of a wave
    carried away on the crest of a wave
    carried away on the crest of a wave
    Ebook142 pages1 hour

    carried away on the crest of a wave

    By David Yee

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    From the shore of Ko Phi Phi in Thailand to a suburb in Utah to a mysterious Kafkaesque hole in the ground, carried away on the crest of a wave gives us brief glimpses into the lives of a sphinx-like escort, a grieving father, a conflicted priest, brothers of legend, a felonious housewife, an accountant of time, an orphaned boy, a radio shock jock and a man who finds things. Each are connected, primarily, by the cataclysmic 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that claimed the lives of over a quarter million people. In a series of vignettes, carried away on the crest of a wave illustrates the ripple effect of one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history and ponders what happens when the events that bind us together are the same events that tear us apart.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPlaywrights Canada Press
    Release dateOct 1, 2014
    ISBN9781770912595
    carried away on the crest of a wave
    Author

    David Yee

    David Yee is a mixed-race (half-Chinese, half-Scottish) playwright and actor, born and raised in Toronto. He is the co-founding artistic director of fu-GEN Theatre Company, Canada’s premiere professional Asian Canadian theatre company. A Dora Mavor Moore Award–nominated actor and playwright, his work has been produced internationally and at home. He is a two-time Governor General’s Literary Award nominee for his plays lady in the red dress and carried away on the crest of a wave, the latter of which won the award in 2015, along with the Carol Bolt Award in 2013. He has worked extensively in the Asian Canadian community as an artist and an advocate.

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      Book preview

      carried away on the crest of a wave - David Yee

      carried

      away

      on the

      crest

      of a

      wave

      David Yee

      Playwrights Canada Press

      Toronto

      For D & A, and all who suffered and all who lost. And for those no longer among us.

      Contents

      Dedication

      Foreword

      Preface

      Production History

      Characters

      The Leap Second Story

      The Swimming Child Story

      The Saint Story

      The Radio Story

      The Orphan Boy Story

      The Water Story

      The Falling Story

      The Millimetre Story

      The Vermin Story

      Acknowledgements

      About the Author

      Also By

      Copyright

      Preface

      This is a play about hope.

      The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami struck the coasts of fourteen countries spanning two continents over a period of twelve hours, beginning the morning of December 26th. It killed over 250,000 people from forty-six different countries, the deadliest tsunami in recorded history.

      I have a friend who narrowly escaped while in Khao Lak, Thailand. In the days that followed, in the middle of the night, she would call me from the Thai hospital where she was convalescing. She’d recount to me what she was seeing, through a haze of painkillers, and those stories stuck with me long after she’d been discharged and returned home.

      Over the course of five years, from 2007 to 2012, I read numerous accounts and conducted personal interviews with individuals and families who suffered tragic losses on that day, or who had miraculous stories of survival. . . sometimes both. An overwhelming number of them experienced moments of inexplicable coincidence, or profound intersection. Some of them even found hope. Not a single person I’ve spoken to has told me the story I’d expected to hear. The stories contained herein are not purely fiction, nor are they strictly fact. They are all, however, rooted in some common truth, shared experience or moment of unflinching honesty.

      In 2011 I was at a conference in Xiamen, China, before heading to Thailand to do some first-hand research. While there, I wound up drinking with a Swedish girl I’d met at the conference. Mentioning sort of off-handedly where I was on my way to, she smiled knowingly and paused before saying, I was there. She had been in Khao Lak as well. In fact, she’d been in the same hotel as my friend, only a few rooms apart. That’s how small the world is.

      From Patong Beach in Phuket you can see—very distinctly—the line along the coast where rebuilding has taken place. I wanted to take a picture, something detailed, but it was impossible to get the entirety of it in a single shot. If I walked farther back, I could see the whole landscape, but it was missing the detail, the sharpness I was looking for. Instead, I walked the perimeter of the line, taking several photographs that I could later edit together. It seemed a suitable metaphor for how I’d written the play.

      It seemed impossible to sum up what happened on December 26, 2004, in a single narrative. Instead, carried away on the crest of a wave has an anthological structure: it’s several short plays in a single container. This, to me, was the only way to approach it, the only way to capture the enormity of it while preserving a trenchant insight. That being said, every small play was written in reference to and in service of the larger structure. There are connections inside, between stories and characters, across the history and geography of the play. Some are obvious, but most require some excavation. The original Toronto cast referred to them as Easter eggs in rehearsal, things they would discover that connected them to others, expanding the world radially. None of the stories in this play stand alone, though they might seem to at first. Everything is connected.

      Finally, this is not a definitive account of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. There are so many stories that couldn’t make it in; they were too unwieldy or took the play, as a whole, too off course. It also hasn’t entirely finished happening yet. The tsunami set some events into motion which have yet to conclude. In December 2011, an Indonesian girl presumed dead found her way back to her village, seven years later, with only the vague memory of a café and one family member’s first name to guide her. She was eight years old when she disappeared and it’s still unclear how she survived or where she’d been for seven years. How many more, like her, are still out there?

      This play contains nine stories. Stories about redemption, the impossibility of grief, loss, strange serendipity, brutality, sacrifice. . . but the play, as a whole, as the bottle these missives are preserved inside. . . this is a play about hope.

      David Yee

      Gold Coast, 2014

      Foreword

      In our hyper-wired world of today, with its twenty-four hour news cycle, tragedies spread across our screens and around the globe at the speed of light. But how many random acts of cruelty can our spirits process, or even truly remember? In carried away on the crest of a wave, the wildly talented young playwright David Yee slows time to examine one such disaster intimately: the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. The deadliest tsunami in recorded history, this disaster claimed roughly a quarter of a million lives, primarily in South and Southeast Asia. Yet, true

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