“Chinese Affection: Tennessee Williams’s Eccentricities of a Nightingale in Hong Kong”

In 2003, established American director David Kaplan directed at the Hong Kong Repertory Theatre a production of Tennessee Williams’s Eccentricities of a Nightingale. By envisioning, and to some extent producing, a conversation between Williams’s play and the city of Hong Kong, with its audiences and its social fabric, this essay hopes to reveal some heretofore underexplored threads in the play itself, and in the very act of cultural trafficking which is embedded in much of globalized dramatic practice. While much of the first half of this essay is devoted to an analysis of the play, its genealogy, and its critical history, the second half attempts a few interpretative moves, which draw connections between Hong Kong contemporary society and David Kaplan’s directorial decisions. I will argue that while a few dynamics staged in Williams’s play may already resonate with the Hong Kong audience, Kaplan’s Hong Kong production powerfully interpreted and developed some of the most significant threads running through it, namely a critique to gender conformity and to social propriety.