January 16, 2024

By Justin Davidson

You can count on suffering to supply stage music with heft, and Huang Ruo’s choral drama Angel Island mined a mother lode 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. The center’s 30-year lifespan, from 1910 to 1940, coincided with a period in American history when prejudice and fear dominated immigration policy. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and its update a decade later, the Geary Act, ensured that those who did arrive, especially from China, faced imprisonment, harassment, and summary deportation. Some detainees carved poems in their cells’ wooden walls, and Ruo interspersed those verses, sung by an ensemble, with spoken sections narrating a dismal history of discrimination.

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