In ‘White Rooster,’ playwright Matthew Yee summons the ghosts of his Chinese ancestors

During tech week for the world premiere of “White Rooster” at Lookingglass Theatre, crew members bustled about attempting to solve last-minute issues. Onstage a group of actors who looked like dusty prospectors from the Old West gathered around a massive wooden set piece. A woman in clean denim played an electric guitar.

That guitarist, actor Sunnie Eraso, appeared in stark contrast from everything else.

For the show’s writer and creator, Matthew Yee, 37, puzzling together styles and genres is part of the magic of theater — and why he feels so at home at Lookingglass Theatre. His newest work, “White Rooster,” opening Saturday and running through April 12, is technically a ghost story. Yet it’s told through music, puppetry and drama, and inspired by the playwright’s Chinese culture, despite its setting in post-Gold Rush California.

Writing the play has helped Yee, a second-generation Asian American whose father is Chinese and mother is white, understand previously untold parts of his family history and reconnect with traditions of his forefathers in China.

“I started writing it in 2020 right before COVID hit,” said Yee, during a rehearsal break inside the lobby of the theater. The playwright's inspiration came after he finished dinner with his father’s side of his family. It was Chinese New Year, just weeks before the global COVID-19 pandemic would start spreading around the globe.

“We were talking about my great-grandfather, who was born in Canton in southern China. We knew he was an orphan, and that he was adopted into the Yee family. But that was all we knew,” he said.

For the first time, at this dinner, Yee’s aunt, an elder in the family, told the full story of his great-grandfather, who was an orphan. Once adopted by the family, he got the Yee name.

The revelation from his aunt: His adoption was the result of a “ghost marriage.”

After researching the topic, Yee learned ghost marriages were a tradition in China where sometimes a wedding is still held among young people who are deceased. In some cases, when a young man dies, his parents can marry his spirit to a young woman. The woman then cares for a white rooster in place of her dead husband.

“If somebody is unmarried and they happen to die, their spirit will be married to either another dead person, or a living person who wants to get married,” Yee explained.

In the case of Yee’s great-grandfather: a young woman and a young man from different families died. The two sets of parents married the spirits of their deceased children and adopted a boy — Yee’s grandfather — as their grandchild to raise.

“After hearing that, everybody in my family was like, ‘Matt, you got to write a play about that.’ So I did,” he said.

This is not the first time Yee has infused pieces of his own culture into his work. In 2023, Lookingglass premiered his musical “Lucy and Charlie’s Honeymoon." The show follows two first-generation Asian Americans who become renegades and go on the run against a soundtrack fused with country western and folk music.

In a way, Yee was telling the story of his father’s generation, which he described as leaning heavily into American culture and away from his Chinese culture.

“I think ‘Lucy and Charlie’ was about that whole idea that this generation of immigrant children have sort of lost their connection to their culture and are actually really avoiding it,” he said. “Then they discover that they can have a relationship with it in a way that feels like who they are as Americans.”

Yee grew up in the Chicago suburbs and attended Wheaton High School. He played football for a year, but after deciding he didn’t like getting hit, pivoted to theater and landed a role in “Grease.”

In “White Rooster,” he also explores both sides of his heritage and fuses them on stage. He started with Chinese folklore and mythology, paired with tradition of ghost marriages, and placed these themes in the American west, in what he describes as, “weird amalgam of American culture mixed with Chinese mythology and folklore.”

To bring the story to life, he worked with costume designer Mara Blumenfeld, a fellow Lookingglass ensemble member. Together, they tried to design characters that span cultures from different sides of the world.

“Matt was really inspired by this town in California in the Gold Rush,” she said. “So that's like 1850s. And that's a period where there was a huge influx of Chinese immigrants building the railroad. But then we were also looking later towards the Depression era, the Dust Bowl. From a costume perspective, we were like, how do we take these sort of visual elements of East meets West, and the mashing of time periods.”

As an artist, Yee is drawn to the idea of making things and does so in many different mediums. Outside of theater, he also enjoys woodworking and crafting things from leather.

In “White Rooster,” Yee draws from that love of craft by blending in multiple distinctive forms of puppetry, including a half-person half-puppet Frankensteined rooster, the details of which the crew attempts to keep under wraps.

“Is it a puppet? Is it a costume?” Eraso asks. “I remember the very first workshop that we did with this show about a year ago, something Matt said was, this show and its relationship to puppetry is continuing to pull out from a bag of tricks. It's a physical puppet one moment, then we're in shadow puppetry land, then we're into a human sized costume. All of these are surprise reveals, transformations to make a really magical world.”

In the end, this production is a lot of things. But at its core, it represents Yee’s vision and his way of using theater to connect to his roots.

“I'm trying to find ways to combine the Americanism that I know and understand with this Chinese folklore storytelling history that I don't have such a connection to in my everyday life,” Yee said. The result: a man-sized rooster, ghosts and the Wild Wild West.