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

Prologue

Prologue Written fourteen years after I became part of the Chinese diaspora in America, this book is intimately related to my memories of growing up in a family of celebrated theatrical artists in Beijing. In my early childhood, theater was a form of “child’s play,” a taste of paradise granted me each Saturday night, when I was placed on a small stool next to the stage lights, at the corner of what seemed the immeasurably vast stage of the China Youth Art Theater (Zhongguo qingnian yishu juyuan). From behind the curtains, I watched with curiosity and wonder as my mother played the role of Almaviva, the countess in The Marriage of Figaro (Feijialou de hunyin), performed for the first time in 1962. Well known in the Western theater repertoire, this play was originally written by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, and on the occasion of its premiere in 1784, it met with ecstatic applause from all sections of the house not occupied by the aristocracy . My parents later told me that, although pronounced foreign and bourgeois by Marxist doctrinaires, The Marriage of Figaro was nevertheless 2 | a c t i n g t h e r i g h t pa r t a remarkable and thoroughly revolutionary piece of theater for its time. In the historical context of the coming French Revolution, it can be imagined what alarm and fright the spectacle of the servant Figaro daring to mock his master gave the aristocratic members of the audience. I was also told that the performance of this French play on the Chinese stage was intended to illustrate a revolutionary truth taught by Chairman Mao Zedong —to wit, that those of the most exalted class strata were the most foolish among us, whereas society’s humblest were the most intelligent. I also watched my mother in the Chinese play Young Folk in a Remote Region (Yuanfang qingnian; premiered in 1963) playing the role of Amina, a beautiful Moslem girl who devotes herself to constructing the socialist motherland in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. It was beyond my powers at the time to discern that these two culturally different plays both re-created two extraordinary revolutionary dramas taking place on the larger stage of the outside world. Unexpectedly, the antiroyalist French play could be viewed as pertaining somehow to the Chinese ethnicminority play about thousands of ex-slaves in feudal pre-1949 Xinjiang enjoying for the first time the fruits of a socialist revolution.1 The slaves were depicted as masters of a new Chinese nation—as happy citizens in a predominantly Han state that generously and lovingly “parented” its fiftyfive -plus ethnic minority groups, as seen in the harmonious Uighur community (Fig. 1). I later learned that Wu Yuxiao, a Han Chinese, wrote the play after living in Xinjiang, where he gained firsthand experience in the life-style of minority groups. The play premiered in Beijing in December 1963 and enjoyed a successful run of seventy-six performances in the first season, an impressive record in comparison to the other ten plays that opened the same year.2 Ten premieres in the single year of 1963 also marked a record high in the history of the China Youth Art Theater. The theater thrived at that time, with approximately two hundred professional employees. Such state sponsorship, which provided an unparalleled opportunity for developing the dramatic arts in the 1950s and 1960s, disappeared in post-Maoist China. At age ten I was awaiting my mother’s return from her year-long tour in Xinjiang, where, in addition to playing her acclaimed role in Young Folk in a Remote Region, she coached the Moslem amateur actors and actresses in stage acting. I remember how, in the breezy September evenings, I felt reluctant to go to bed, sitting instead on a stool in the courtyard, counting the stars in the sky and guessing which ones were twinkling over the faraway land where my mother was. I was not then aware that this play, p r o l o g u e | 3 written and performed by Han people, the majority ethnic group, was already being introduced in the vast areas inhabited by diverse ethnic and religious groups as an exemplar of popular theater.3 In contrast to the traditional theater of indigenous cultures, this new and modern dramatic genre was being explored as a means both of teaching Mandarin, the major...