Theater and Society: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama (review)

Theater and Society: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama. Edited by Haiping Yan. Armonk, New York and London, England: M. E. Sharpe, 1998; pp. xlvi + 328. $62.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

In the late autumn of 1979, as a graduate student living in Nanjing and researching theatre in China, I was taken late one night via a fantastically circuitous route to meet with the playwright Sha Yexin. His play If I Were Real (Jiaru wo shi zhende) had just been banned and he was on his way back to Shanghai from Beijing, his fate highly uncertain. He met with several students and writers in an icy, dark, high-ceilinged room at the top of a great many stairs—it seemed to me to be part of a warehouse, though I couldn't be certain since I was blindfolded for the latter part of the long walk there. He spoke with us about his experiences of the past several months, his hopes and his fears. I was left stunned by the enormity of his commitment and by the courage of artists who work in the face of threats to career—if not livelihood—and life.

The atmosphere and emotions of that meeting resonated vibrantly throughout the theatre world in China during the decade that followed. In Theater and Society: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama, Haiping Yan has gathered a remarkable and invaluable collection of seminal dramatic texts from the 1980s, including three huaju (literally "spoken drama," the Western-inspired theater form that began developing in China in the early twentieth century and was based almost entirely in realism and then socialist realism until the period covered by this anthology), one chuanju (also known as "Sichuan/Szechuan opera" in English, one of the more than 300 forms of xiqu or indigenous Chinese theater that is often called "Chinese opera" in English), and one film script. All five works were national centers of controversy; all are representative of the major developmental streams in China's dramatic literature during the 1980s. Yan's extraordinary introduction presents a gripping and remarkably nuanced view of the interconnection between theatre and society in the turbulent post-Cultural Revolution decade.

Bus Stop (Chezhan, 1983), a huaju play by Gao Xingjian, was one of the first plays written as a conscious break from the school of critical realism. In it, a group of people wait ten years for a bus to take them from their local station to the city. Many buses pass but none stop, and most people are so wrapped up in their own dreams and desires that few notice when one silent man chooses to simply walk into town. By the end of the play, however, other people are preparing to walk to town themselves. As Yan argues, the play is far from a mere imitation of Waiting for Godot, and in fact presents a very Chinese rather than Western modernism; while Godot essentially negates the possibility of change, Bus Stop "offers the 'silent man,' and an individual search for direction in a moment of social transformation and political uncertainty" (xx).

WM (We, 1985), a huaju play by Wang Peigong and Wang Gu, offers aspects of two emerging schools of writing: critical realism and experimental modernism. The play chronicles the lives of seven young people as they cope with drastic changes brought on by political, economic, and societal forces during the period 1976-1984. It begins in the countryside where these educated youth have been sent during the Cultural Revolution and concludes in an expensive urban restaurant where they meet for a reunion. Through it all, they remain bound by their shared youth in the countryside; the play ends with them humming along with a group of distant children who are singing the team song "Young Socialist Pioneers." The play expresses both the growing sense of alienation in experimental modernism and the longing for social justice and equality of critical realism.

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