Acting the Right Part: Political Theater and Popular Drama in Contemporary China

8. A Stage in Search of a Tradition: The Dynamics of Form and Content in Post-Maoist Theater

A Stage in Search of a Tradition the dynamics of form and content in post-maoist theater Since its inception, modern Chinese drama has been inseparable from the May Fourth movement and its anti-imperialist and antitraditionalist agenda. During its history, however, this anti-imperialist thrust has in many instances led to a paradox, as the antitraditional aspect of modern Chinese drama undermines its anti-imperialist dimension.1 The best example of this contradiction can be found in the well-known appearance of Hu Shi’s The Main Event of One’s Life, in which he imitated Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Hu sought to introduce Western dramatic form as an alternative to the traditional operatic theater, viewed at the time as “a dehumanized literature.” Hu chose a Western form of drama to express the thematic concerns of May Fourth intellectuals, whose very antitraditional position found its best target in the old form of operatic theater. A similar history 292 | a c t i n g t h e r i g h t pa r t seems to have repeated itself in early post-Maoist China, when Chinese playwrights turned to Western dramatic forms, such as epic and absurdist theater, to revive the stagnant theater dominated by the Maoist doctrine of socialist-realism with its emphasis on “healthy” or “ideologically correct ” themes. To further explore the dynamics of form and content, this chapter will focus on a group of plays in early post-Maoist theater that are known for their formalistic features. In fact, critics claimed it was primarily for their innovative formalist features that these plays won approval. While this claim remains true, the “aesthetic” aspects in many instances cannot survive or become culturally meaningful without also being personal and political. This is not to say that aesthetic or highly literary and dramatic forms are not appreciated on the Chinese stage, or that in early post-Maoist China they were always deemed secondary to political and thematic concerns . Rather, it means that the so-called aesthetic considerations in contemporary Chinese drama can only take hold when incorporated with political considerations. In a censored society, these considerations are also profoundly and inevitably personal. Because they were inseparable from their historical and political contexts, dramatic styles and techniques were never treated merely as formalistic categories. They reflected the dramatists ’ visions of the world, their positions vis-à-vis the characters they depicted and the audience they were trying to attract, the state ideology they appropriated or manipulated in presenting their ideas, and the collective consciousness that had given rise to theatrical space as a relatively coherent imagined community. These contexts will be viewed as meeting grounds for the dialectics of form and content, and the dichotomies of private and public, traditional and modern, and East and West. In the course of discussing these dichotomies, I will also treat gender politics in contemporary Chinese theater, where the representations of women characters further complicate the relationships between those dichotomies. Hu Shi’s The Main Event of One’s Life adopted from Western theater not only the spoken form but also illusionist theater, otherwise known as proscenium theater. As the Greek word proskenion indicates (pro, before; skene, tent), proscenium theater is oriented toward the invisible (fourth) wall between audience and players, which helps to create the illusion of a representative stage. What is enacted beyond the wall is supposed to represent real life and events, whose verisimilitude is supposed to be so convincing as to be unquestioned by audiences, according to Richard Southern,2 although most realistic theater compromised with illusionist¯¯ ¯ a s ta g e i n s e a r c h o f a t r a d i t i o n | 293 theater. This illusionist theater, which reached its apex in nineteenthcentury realistic and naturalist theater as represented by Ibsen, Chekhov, and Strindberg, became the predominant dramatic genre in modern China and was promoted in the PRC as the form most closely conforming to the Maoist theory of literature. The Sitanni tixi (Stanislavsky method), based on a theory of acting developed and practiced by the Russian Konstantin Stanislavsky, further helped to establish illusionist theater on the Chinese stage. Stanislavsky’s emphasis on a completely realistic performance, achieved through voice and body training, re-creation of the dramatic situation in terms of the actors’ own personal impressions and memories, and total identification with the situations and characters...