FOLKLORE, GHOSTS, AND
THE WEIGHT OF THE DEAD

Matthew C. Yee’s wildly ambitious world premiere
dazzles, even as its larger shape remains elusive

Death, and coming to terms with it, have been fertile ground for the theatre since its inception. In White Rooster, multi-hyphenate Matthew C. Yee—he writes! He directs! He acts! He composes!—examines death through the prism of folklore, specifically Chinese folklore. This highly anticipated world premiere turns the stage of the Lookingglass Theatre into a haunted house, with ghosts and spirits—both vengeful and benign—everywhere you turn.

The location is California. The time, as far as I can tell, is shortly after the Gold Rush. Natsu Onoda Power’s vivid set is a battered wood shack, with an attic cutaway. Weathered fencing lines the lot, and the house itself is on stilts, the area below it serving as the now-disused gold mines in the drought-ridden town. Everyone is starving and thirsty, but as the play opens, a young girl, Min (Sunnie Eraso), lingers outside the locked door of the attic. She’s convinced that someone lives up there; whether ghost or person, she’s not sure. Her parents refuse to believe her, but Min is determined to make contact.

It’s hard to overstate the staggering ambition of this project, not just thematically, but in terms of the technical elements as well. The prologue is in the form of a folk ballad, but accompanied by a rousing electric guitar—original folk songs pop up at regular intervals to comment on the story—and the white sheets double as screens for shadow puppetry. Ghost stories and legends are narrated, and each time I was astonished at the level of artistry and craft involved in each telling.

The central storyline involves the Chinese tradition of mínghūn, or spirit marriage. When Min’s boyfriend, Pong (Reilly Oh), dies in a mining accident, his grandparents ask her to officially join their family by wedding a white rooster that ostensibly contains the spirit of her deceased beloved. Browbeaten by the grandparents and disowned by her own parents, Min reluctantly acquiesces.

Not content with the ghost characters in the play itself, Yee also peppers the narrative with other folkloric phantasms: there are ghosts hungry for pork, ghosts who need to feed on children, and so on. Beautiful shadow puppetry, exquisitely scored (Justin Cavazos) and lit (Hannah Wien), is used to relate each story.

On the subject of puppetry, Caitlin McLeod’s puppet of the white rooster is a thing of great beauty. That’s not to diminish the other puppets (which are gorgeous), but it’s just in a league of its own. A couple of days later, I’m still marveling at its design.

Unsolicited recommendation: If the folklore fascinates you, pick up a copy of Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling. You want the John Minford translation. You’ll thank me later.

So far, we have puppets, shadow plays, folk-songs-but-electric, zombie dancing—did I not mention the zombie dancing?—and you’d think that would be enough for Yee, but no. There’s also a beautiful—and beautifully creepy—dance piece: a pas de deux involving a character and the ghost on their back. The white rooster transitions from puppet to a full-sized costume to a shadow, and at one point I found myself thinking, “Good God, man, take a break!”

What’s impressive is not just the sheer volume of imagination on display, but the fact that almost all the set pieces work. It’s the connective tissue that falters.

As Min, Sunnie Eraso is the center of the production, but it is a relatively thankless role. Min is almost an anachronism—a 21st-century character stuck in an early 20th-century story. She sticks out like a sore thumb—I’m convinced by design—and, as the audience surrogate, aside from some fiddly stuff with the puppets, she doesn’t get to do that much; she has to be the slightly boring protagonist while the rest of the cast gets to whoop it up.

And boy do they ever. Mark L. Montgomery as Min’s father and Daniel Lee Smith as her grandfather-in-law chew the scenery in the best possible way. Elliot Esquivel is clearly having a blast as the witch doctor Wu (although he’s less effective as Fang—a second love interest). But my favorite person on stage is the ever-awesome Karen Aldridge (Dr. Reghabi!) as Min’s mother, who delivers the best ghost story of the lot; she also seems to be terrifyingly double-jointed. I kid, I kid—but seriously, her physical movement during a couple of the scenes freaked me out.

White Rooster is a strange fusion of Eastern folklore and Western mythmaking. At its best, it serves up powerful commentary on the process of bereavement and the value of storytelling in that process, harkening back to a time when these stories were crafted not to entertain but to help people cope and move on. But if the individual pieces are stunning, it still doesn’t come together as a whole. There are a few issues here and there—there’s a weirdly dead, momentum-killing stretch of about ten minutes after the spirit marriage, and the ending is best described as a shrug—but even setting that aside, the overall thesis doesn’t quite gel. I had an idea what Yee was going for, but even at the end, it was still frustratingly nebulous, teasing insights that remained just around the corner.

No matter. I cannot, in good conscience, give a show with this much ambition, verve, and imagination anything less than my highest recommendation. Maybe Yee will tweak his script into perfection, maybe he won’t. In either case, this is a gripping and ferociously entertaining evening at the theatre, and an experience that’s as sui generis as you’re likely to get on stage.

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White Rooster
Lookingglass Theatre
Water Tower Water Works, 821 N. Michigan Ave.
Wed at 7:30; Thurs at 2 & 7:30; Fri at 7:30; Sat at 2 & 7:30; Sun at 2
ends on April 26, 2026
for tickets, call 312.337.0665 or visit Lookingglass

for more shows, visit Theatre in Chicago

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