Marionette Plays from Northern China by Fan Pen Li Chen (review)

Marionette Plays from Northern China. By Fan Pen Li Chen. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017. x + 344 pp. 33 illus. Cloth $95.00. Paper $27.95. While the shadow theater has enjoyed a certain amount of prestige due to the perceived literary nature of its scripts, “wooden” puppet plays have historically been marginalized. As Dr. Chen points out, even the terms used for shadow puppetry and wooden puppetry are different, though in most languages, they appear to be grouped together with the necessary modifiers that come from either their intrinsic differences (shadow) or their method of manipulation (glove, rod, string, horizontal iron-rods). China is an especially rich source of traditional puppet theater, with examples of most forms still extant, but often in different regions. English translations of traditional Chinese puppet scripts are extremely rare. Dr. Chen has already produced two books of shadow theater plays, as well as another marionette play in her newest book, Journey of a Goddess (SUNY Press, 2017). Marionette Plays from Northern China, her first collection of string-puppet plays, contains translations of eight scripts gathered during fieldwork in Heyang City 合陽, Shaanxi. String puppets (marionettes), while quite common in the south (especially Fujian), are virtually unknown in other parts of the north. At her last count, only three troupes still perform in Heyang, down from nearly fifty before mid-century. During the Cultural Revolution, many handwritten copies of scripts (which included performance transcriptions) were destroyed. While some were published, even those books are now hard to find. Consequently, this valuable volume is the result of both dedicated field work and skilled, theatrically sensitive translation. Dr. Chen introduces the volume with a concise overview of Chinese puppet theater history, with an emphasis upon the string theater of Heyang. (Heyang claims to be the historical origin of string puppetry, although this is not well supported, despite puppet facial features that might sculpturally date the tradition back to the Tang.) Continuing , she introduces each play’s dominant themes, literary references, dramatic characteristics , and historical context. The eight plays include three “post-midnight skits,” three plays dealing with historical events with various degrees of accuracy, and finally two romances. One of the latter, The White Undershirt (Bai hanshan 白汗 衫), displays familiar scenes of romantic intrigue and mistaken identity. The local hero of the Heyang puppet theater is Baldy, a classic clownish everyman figure with an appropriately bald pate. He is featured in a short “midnight play,” a once highly suggestive burlesque-type comedy for adult male audiences. Dr. Chen includes the previously published Baldy’s Wedding Night (Tuzi naofang 禿子鬧 房),1 in which Baldy discovers his new bride’s baldness on his wedding night, much to his initial horror and the spectator’s delight. Though Dr. Chen observes that the original sexual wordplay is muted for contemporary audiences, she also notes that some suggestive visual nuances (Baldy’s pate, for example) are still very present. Viewing a performance online, I found that the combination of the highly performable translation and (in my experience) unusually nuanced puppet manipulation formed a delightful combination. While these plays give every indication of being accurate, rigorous translations, free of adaptation, they remain highly accessible to the general reader or theater 1 Fan Pen Chen, “‘Baldy’s Wedding Night’: A Post-Midnight Marionette Play from Shaanxi,” CHINOPERL 29.1 (2010): 133–41. 80 CHINOPERL: JOURNAL OF CHINESE ORAL AND PERFORMING LITERATURE 37. 1 practitioner (such as myself). Dramas that incorporate music and choreography along with spoken text are famously difficult to transcribe, as language is only one part of the performance. Puppetry is more dependent upon spectacle and character design than many other performance forms. The marionette theater’s potential for character exaggeration, freed from anatomical limitations, is even greater than that of the masked or painted face drama. The sheer virtuosity of skillful puppet manipulation and raucous physical comedy can provide audiences with rich theatrical experiences that are not dependent upon spoken texts—not unlike those of the traditional operas that share so many of their characteristics. In addition, folk plays often rely upon wordplay in dialect and local topical references intended to entertain specific audiences—thus proving additionally challenging to translate in...