When I met Emma Qian for our interview, she was on stage. It was a Monday afternoon—Do You Feel Anger, her directorial debut, had its final show the previous Friday. She had been cleaning up the aftermath of the production with her cast and crew for a few hours, and now she and her stars were sitting together and writing each other goodbye notes. She showed me to a dressing room for us to talk, where one of her actors had recently been scrubbing away at fake blood residue. I was moved by the post-production glow and sentimentality of saying goodbye that emanated from both the space and Emma herself.
Whenever Emma talked about her cast, she was overflowing with warmth and love. “One of the most lucky things about this production,” said Emma, “is everyone cares about each other so much and has shown each other so much care.” At one point, I asked Emma if there was anything in particular she wanted to talk about regarding the play. She replied: “What I want to say about the play is how amazing everyone is.” And for good reason — each member of the ensemble (Ellie Mota as Sofia, Gabrielle Germain as Eva, Ava Maika as Mother/Janie, Darcy Blaik as Jon, and Maya Kanitkar as Howie, Jonny Rees as Jordan, and Elias Luz as Old Man) shone in this production.
Do You Feel Anger, written by Mara Nelson-Greenburg in 2019, follows an empathy coach hired by a debt collection agency as she tries to work within the immense dysfunction of the office while simultaneously managing a family crisis. Despite this subject matter, it is also, I feel the need to add, deeply funny. I was curious about the choice of the play — in addition to its exploration of empathy, Do You Feel Anger is resolutely centred on female experiences and struggles in the workplace; it is a play about patriarchy and the devastation it inevitably brings. It was painfully prescient, and I asked Emma about her production’s relationship to the political climate of the moment. “I think emotional literacy is going out the window,” she told me. “I think empathy is as well. I think we’re at a time where traditional gender norms are weirdly making a comeback. Capitalism has us in our clutches as well, and I think that we are so often told what we can and cannot feel.”
The most impressive thing about the play is the games it plays with tone — there is a humour in the play for most of its runtime, interspersed with darker moments, until the latent darkness we’ve been laughing about becomes wholly unavoidable. Then it becomes harrowing. But, I wondered, why make us laugh at such a terrible reality? I asked her what the humour was doing in the play. She responded, “in real life, humour is a way for us to sweep all this under the rug. You make a joke of things, you laugh.” The play invokes that reflex in its audience — at one point, its tone flips abruptly from whimsical satire to sobering reality. “There’s almost a part of us that’s like ‘Oh no, we were having so much fun!’ and then there’s the drop in your gut of ‘Oh God. We’re going to talk about this now.’” By Emma’s direction, the audience is made complicit in the process of disguising patriarchal violence by humour.
Another interesting choice for a play so determined to tackle very real-world issues is its surrealist tone. Why write a play about such a realistic subject and set it in a world that feels distinctly unreal? Emma told me she wasn’t sure the play would work if it was a straightforward drama about sexual harassment in the workplace. “I think it’s hard to get people to engage with a play like that. If you lure them in with a silly, absurd world that takes these things and turns their head and makes them so obvious in a way that’s almost comical, it gets people engaged.” Based on the responsiveness of the crowd, which roared with laughter one moment and gasped and went silent the next, it certainly accomplished this goal. It was a truly moving experience, in particular because of Emma’s fresh and distinct directorial voice.
