Yan Haiping - Theatre and Society: Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama

ASIA AND THE PACIFIC

This new series explores the most dynamic and contested region of the world, including contributions on political, economic, cultural, and social change in modern and contemporary Asia and the Pacific.

Haiping Yan , Editor

First published 1998 by M.E. Sharpe

Published 2015 by Routledge
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Copyright 1998 Taylor & Francis. All right reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Theater and society : an anthology of contemporary Chinese drama /
Haiping Yan, editor
p. cm. (Asia and the Pacific)
An East gate book.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-7656-0307-1 (alk. paper).
ISBN 0-7656-0308-X (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Chinese drama20th centuryTranslations into English.
I. Yen, Hai-ping. II. Series.
PL2658.E5T47 1998
895.125208dc2197-51561
CIP

ISBN 13: 9780765603081 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 9780765603074 (hbk)

Yan Haiping

Gao Xingjian

Wang Peigong and Wang Gui

PAN JINLIAN: THE HISTORY OF A FALLEN WOMAN
(Pan Jinlian: yige nuren de chenlunshi, 1986)

Wei Minglun

Chen Zidu, Yang Jian, and Zhu Xiaoping

Zheng Yi and Wu Tianming

Theater and Society: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama is finally completed for English-speaking readers. Conceived almost eight years ago, this anthology, I hope, contributes to the building of artistic bridges between the different cultures on both sides of the Pacific.

I must thank Mark Seiden for his constant support throughout a long working process full of interesting and, at times, unexpected difficulties. Along with his initial invitation to participate in his book series on Asia, I have received generous encouragement, challenges, and help. Harold Shadick, the late Professor Emeritus of Chinese Literature, Edward Gunn, Dominick LaCapra, and Michael Hays at Cornell University have been unfailing sources of support over the years. Martin Coben, Professor Emeritus of Theatre at the University of Colorado at Boulder carefully read part of the translations even though he was battling cancer. Howard Goldblatt, another colleague whom I am fortunate to have in Boulder, provided invaluable help. Wang Zhen the former President of Chinese Drama Publishing House, and Xu Xiaozhong, the current President of Chinese Central Drama Academy, have made specific and continuous efforts to ensure that this project reach its completion.

I would like to thank all the contributors in this anthology and, specifically, to thank Jiang Hong, Timothy Cheek, and Thomas Yorkthree colleagues whose excellent translations of the first two plays discussed in my Introduction are, unfortunately, not included in this book due to space limitations. Their love for Chinese dramatic literature and their commitment to its dissemination and appreciation in an Ensligh-speaking environment have confirmed and sustained my belief in creative cultural translations and productive cross-cultural communications.

Last but certainly not least are my special thanks to Doug Merwin, Patricia Loo, and Angela Piliouras, my editors at M.E. Sharpe. Their tireless efforts and meticulous work have made the process of completing this anthology most pleasant and memorable.

Y.H.

Yan Haiping

The five texts presented in this anthology are selected from the hundreds of plays and film scripts written and produced each year in China since 1979. Registering the nations social, economic, political, and cultural transformations, these works have been published in leading journals and staged in major theaters, provoked powerful responses from Chinese audiences, and caused heated discussions, controversies, and confrontations on a national scale. Representing the most important achievements of contemporary Chinese theater, they also cover its two leading genres, namely, traditional regional music drama and modern spoken drama.1 The one film script included here, Old Well, is nationally and internationally acclaimed. This anthology, the first to present this dramatic and performing literature, offers both vital information about what has come to be called the dramatic renaissance of the new period and significant insights into a society that has been undergoing complex structural changes.

Drama of the new period, like other forms of art and literature of the era, began as a critical response to the Cultural Revolution (19661976). Upon emerging from these ten years of civil strife and political fragmentation, many people were frustrated, angry, and deeply shaken. The shared need to express long-stifled emotions found one effective medium in drama, especially modern spoken drama. The first wave of this theatrical movement lasted approximately two years. From 1976 to 1978, two major kinds of plays were produced on stage nationwide. The first comprised new productions of some of the best-known plays created before 1966, such as Nihongdeng xiade shaobing (Sentries under the neon light) and Jiang jie (Elder sister Jiang). The former is about a group of young soldiers of the Peoples Liberation Army who come from rural backgrounds but have learned to deal successfully with their new and challenging experiences in Shanghai, the largest and most westernized city in China; the latter is based on the life of a woman revolutionary who maintained her integrity while being imprisoned, tortured, and finally executed by the Guomindang government in the 1940s.2 As dramatizations embodying the social, cultural, and political values of a socialist new China, these plays were extremely popular when staged in the 1950s and the early 1960s. During the Cultural Revolution, along with most other literary and artistic works produced since 1949, they were denounced as poisonous weeds and consequently banned.3 The creators of those works were accused of various political crimes and many of them died of persecution.4 While violent social forces were released in the course of the Cultural Revolution to attack traditional culture, eight model plays in the forms of the Beijing Opera and sinicized Western ballet monopolized the stage of Chinese performing art. Professional theater in general was suppressed; many theater companies were disbanded; modern spoken drama in particular was proclaimed dead by Jiang Qing and her followers.5 The restaging at the national level in the late 1970s of the dramas popular before 1966, therefore, indicated the ending of an era in the nations cultural and political life and the beginning of what has been called a dramatic renaissance.