Geography: Americas > Northern America > Canada
Year: 2025
Produced by: Tarragon Theatre (Extraspace, Toronto)
Creative Team: Playwright: Diana Tso | Director/Choreographer: William Yong
Synopsis: Carried by the River is a poetic, intergenerational drama that follows Kai, a Chinese Canadian woman who, upon the death of her mother, discovers that she was abandoned at birth under China’s one-child policy and adopted into a diasporic life in Canada, prompting a return journey to China in search of her origins. Structured through a lyrical, non-linear form that blends realism with magic realism, featuring spirit animals, ancestral presences, and fluid transitions between the living and the dead, the play constructs a dreamlike theatrical landscape where memory, myth, and identity intertwine. It situates migration within a framework of transnational adoption, gendered displacement, and diasporic return, foregrounding how state policies (such as the one-child policy) produce invisible forms of forced separation that reverberate across generations. By staging the search for origins as both emotional and epistemological, the work interrogates questions of belonging, sexuality, and cultural inheritance, raising ethical concerns about who gets to claim identity, how histories of abandonment are narrated, and whether “home” can ever be recovered when one’s origins are structurally obscured.
Source: https://www.fetechinoise.ca/blog/2025/carried-by-the-river