A Classic Chinese Spoken Drama
[For
the past two months or so, I’ve been working on the transcription of a journal
I kept while I was on a trip through the People’s Republic of China in
1980. While I was in the city of
Nanjing, I bought an English translation of Teahouse, a 1956 play by Lao She, a
renowned playwright of the first half of the 20th century.
[At the time, the play hadn’t been performed in the United States, though that same year it made a tour of Western Europe in Chinese. That would be the first modern Chinese play to be seen outside China. It’s first staging in China after the death of the author had only been presented in 1979, and the first English translation was published that same year.
[In 1983, the U.S. première was mounted in New York City in a new translation by Ying Ruocheng, an actor in the 1979 Beijing revival as well as the international tours of 1980 and 1986, as well as the 1982 film adaptation.
[(A note about the Chinese personal names I use in this post: with one exception, all are in Chinese style, with the family name first and the given name second. So Lao She’s surname is ‘Lao’ and Ying Ruocheng’s is ‘Ying.’ The exception is an essayist whom I cite who works in the West and has westernized his name, putting his family name last we do in the U.S.
[(A further word regarding the romanization of Chinese words and phrases, including the titles of works: in 1979, the government in the People’s Republic mandated that all foreign-language publications of the PRC use the pinyin romanizations instead of the old Wade-Giles system. Western publications began conforming to the Chinese spellings soon after. In general, I’ll use the pinyin spellings, but I may include the Wade-Giles form parenthetically in instances where the old form may be more recognizable to Westerners.)
[I saw the 1983 production, presented by the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre. Unfortunately, I didn’t write a report on the performance (I hadn’t started doing that yet), but there was a New York Times review and, drawing on reviews and write-ups of other stagings, I’m going to try to describe Lao She’s most famous play.
[It’s an interesting drama, both theatrically and historically—though this won’t be another attempt to reconstruct or recover a report of the performance I saw (as I did with Othello in “Some Out-Of-Town Plays from the Archive,” posted on Rick On Theater on 22 December 2020, or Much Ado About Nothing, 20 March 2021).]
Lao She (1899-1966) was the pen name of the Chinese humorist, poet, short-story writer, novelist (Rickshaw Boy [Camel Xiangzi], 1937), and dramatist Shu Qingchun (Wade-Giles romanization: Shu Ch’ing-ch’un).
Of Manchu descent, Lao She was born in Beijing (then known as Peking). His family wasn’t well off, so he was never formally enrolled in a college, though for a short time he registered for courses at Yenching University. In 1924, after teaching Chinese for some time at Nankai Middle School in Tientsin, he left for England to teach his native language at London University’s School of Oriental Studies.
Once abroad, Lao She studied English novels primarily to improve his command of the language. Charles Dickens appealed to him so much that he wrote a comic novel in imitation of Nicholas Nickleby, entitled Lao Zhang de Zhexue (The Philosophy of Lao Zhang). The novel was accepted by the leading literary journal in China at the time, Xiaoshuo Yuebao (The Short Story Magazine), which serialized it in 1926.
Soon after, the magazine serialized Lao She’s second and considerably more comic novel, Zhao zi yue (Master Zhao Says). The hero of the story, a gullible youth in pursuit of honor and glory, is eventually saved from his course of dissipation by turning patriot.
Patriotism plays an even larger role in the author’s third novel, Er Ma (Mr. Ma and Son), a study of the contrasting reactions of a Chinese father and son residing in London to the fact of national humiliation.
From his return to China in 1930 until the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Lao produced four more novels, including Mao cheng ji (Cat Country, 1932), a most savage indictment of China’s decadence and corruption in the form of a Martian fable; and Líhun (Divorce, 1933), a comic study of petty bureaucrats in Peking unable to act on their own.
Lao’s best-known novel is Luo tuo Xiangzi (Camel Xiangzi; better known to Western readers as Rickshaw Boy), a tragic study of individualism in the doomed strivings of the proletarian hero who ceaselessly hauls his rickshaw around the dusty streets of Peking for pennies. This novel, written on the eve of the war, is generally regarded as the author’s masterpiece.
During the Sino-Japanese War, Lao served as the president of the Chinese Writers’ Antiaggression Association. His work in behalf of national resistance deserves praise, but in willingly shouldering the task of propaganda, he appeared to have abandoned his critical attitude toward China to espouse a superficial patriotism in several wartime plays and the novel Huozang (Cremation, 1944).
This is also true of his postwar novel in three parts, Si Shi Tong Tang (Four Generations under One Roof, 1944), which details the lives of patriots and traitors in Japanese-occupied Peking.
Lao She arrived in the United States in April 1946 at the invitation of the State Department and stayed until October 1949. By that time, the communists were in full control of mainland China, and Lao had no choice but to return.
He remained for years an important figure in the communist cultural hierarchy and wrote many plays, of inferior merit, about the reformation of Chinese land and people under communist benevolence. He gave every indication of being a loyal supporter of the Peking government, but his egregious form of flattery, so exaggerated in its denunciation of the state’s enemies, may have been a form of oblique satire.
In any event, by the summer of 1966, when the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) began with the massing of Red Guards in Peking, Lao She was one of the first writers and intellectuals to meet their fury. He ended his life in September of that year by drowning himself in a Peking lake.
Teahouse (Cha Guan – Wade-Giles: Ch’a Kuan; Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1980; available at Barnes & Noble from Press Holdings International [2001] and Amazon from China Books [2013]) was written in 1956 and first published in China in 1957; it had its première in 1958 by the Beijing People’s Art Theater at the city’s Capital Theater (some sources give the première as ’57).
According to Ying Ruocheng’s memoir (Voices Carry: Behind Bars and Backstage during China’s Revolution and Reform, written with Claire Conceison; Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), “Teahouse came about in a rather interesting way.”
Ying (1929-2003) was a longtime member of the Beijing People’s Art Theater, the company that produced Teahouse’s Beijing première, the 1979 revival, and the 1980 and ’86 overseas tours. (Indeed, BPAT is the only troupe in China that presents the play, which it’s staged some 500 times.) Ying was in the 1958 début production, the 1979 revival, and the 1980 European tour, as well as many of the subsequent mountings, including the 1982 movie version.
In Voices Carry, Ying recounts:
In the original version of Dragon Beard Ditch [1951], there was a scene set in a small teahouse, and this scene became a favorite moment that instigated the idea of a separate play with a similar setting. Lao She was also deeply interested in the idea of constitutional democracy in China (something that had inspired his play A Family of Delegates [1951]). After the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China was created in 1954, Lao She wrote another play about the history of constitutional democracy and its failure under all the regimes before 1949. When he came to the theatre to read his first draft, people were not very enthusiastic and he was prepared to scrap the whole thing. But everyone agreed that there was one scene set in a Beijing teahouse at the end of the nineteenth century that should be expanded into an entire play. The result was Teahouse.
Despite its immediate popularity, the play was banned and became one of the emblematic targets of attack for the Cultural Revolution, along with author Lao. The play and its author were charged with being counter-revolutionary, showing too much sympathy for the property-owners and petty bourgeois capitalists who inhabited the teahouse.
The militant Red Guards accused Lao of writing in opposition to the policies of Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong (Wade-Giles: Mao Tse-tung; 1893-1976).
Furthermore, Teahouse was criticized by Marxists for being insufficiently robust in its depiction of communist doctrine. They complained that Teahouse didn’t have enough “positive characters,” meaning heroic communists.
It hadn’t been Lao’s practice to lay out a direct inculcation of any philosophy or point of view, political or otherwise, but to let the actions of his characters and the unfolding of the situation reveal his stance and the point of the play (or novel).
In his autobiography, Ying Ruocheng affirmed: “Lao She cleverly avoided specific references to politics, but merely depicted their impact on the lives of ordinary people . . . .” This didn’t sit well, however, with the Gang of Four, led by Chairman Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing (Wade-Giles: Chiang Ch’ing; 1914-91), or the Red Guards, the founders and the enforcers of the Cultural Revolution.
In fact, Teahouse can be seen—as many critics have affirmed—to hew to the party line. Lao’s storyline shows the corruption and daily cruelties of the societies that preceded the communists. The play can be seen to say that the injustices of the feudal and capitalistic regimes that came before Mao and the PRC would inevitably lead to socialism.
In a PRC-published journal, China Reconstructs, writer Uwe Kräuter (b. 1945), an expatriate German who lives in Beijing, commented that some people who’ve seen Teahouse have remarked in 1980 that “they understand why the Chinese people had longed for a better life and why revolution was the only way possible to achieve this.”
Kräuter, who’s a German communist (he was a member of the KBW [Kommunistische Bund Westdeutschland – Communist League of West Germany], a West German Maoist group) and has lived in China since 1973, has had a long association with Teahouse—among other things, he has been engaged in several productions, including the 1980 European tour and co-authored the German translation. He was writing in an essentially propaganda publication (now entitled China Today) for foreign consumption. I think his statements can be taken as the party line.
A number of critics took this position: that far from being reactionary, in showing the evils of the pre-communist years, Lao provides a lesson on how the PRC has improved the lot of the post-1949 Chinese.
Nonetheless, the Red Guards severely criticized and humiliated Lao in public; they paraded him through the Peking streets and publicly beat him. Whether the writer committed suicide from mortification or hopelessness is unknown. (There are many who even question whether Lao’s death was, in fact, a suicide at all—but there is no evidence to dispute that conclusion.)
Lao and Teahouse were rehabilitated in 1979 (the year the first English translation by John Howard-Gibbon appeared) and the play saw its first overseas staging (in Mandarin; Lao was renowned for writing in the Peking dialect) during a tour of Europe (West Germany, France, and Switzerland) in 1980. It went on tour around the world in 1986, playing in Hong Kong, Canada, England, and Singapore.
(According to Koon-Ki Ho of the University of Hong Kong, Teahouse traveled to the United States for its Chinese-language première there on that 1986 word tour [see “From the Absurdist to the Realist: A Reading of Lao She’s Teahouse from a Comparative Perspective,” Oriens Extremus (1996)]. A performance by the BPAT at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., in October 2005, however, was labeled the U.S. première of the play [see Jacqueline Trescott, “Two Countries On the Potomac,” Washington Post 2 March 2005, and Virginia Anderson, “Performance Review: Teahouse,” Theatre Journal (2006)].)
I saw an Off-Off-Broadway staging in 1983 by the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre (now defunct) at the 28th Street Playhouse in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, the play’s English-language début. It was performed in a new translation from Ying Ruocheng (listed in the program as Ying Rocheng).
Teahouse is a three-act play that depicts the society of China as reflected in the various characters who frequent the Yutai, a Beijing teahouse. It runs three hours, covers half a century, and has over 60 characters. (The casts can run from 25 actors to 35, with lots of doubling and tripling.)
Lao She has said he chose a teahouse for his setting because “People from all walks of life came to the teahouses; they were frequented by people of every possible of character and persuasion.” The playwright saw the traditional Chinese teahouse as the focal point and mirror of Chinese society.
Teahouse has been called a working-class, Chinese Grand Hotel (1930 play by William A. Drake and classic all-star 1932 film from MGM). In the Washington Post, Peter Marks called this “the everyday symphony of city life.” The teahouse, in fact, is not just a setting for the three acts, it’s a character in the play, and not only what happens in it is important, but what happens to it.
The Yutai Teahouse’s customers range from pimps, gangsters, and opium addicts, to students, peasants, country folk, shopkeepers, and peddlers, to rich wastrels with their songbirds in tow, patricians, government spies, secret policemen, and rebels. Lao’s focus is always on the ordinary person whose fate is in the hands of the powerful, but who’s always forgotten, ignored, and dismissed. This, of course, was what attracted the opprobrium of the Red Guards and the extremists of the Cultural Revolution.
The play depicts the societal changes in China through the changes in the Yutai patrons’ lives during the last 14 years of the Qing Dynasty (1898-1912), the Warlord Era (a period of the ROC when the country was divided among military factions, 1916 to 1928), and the victory in the Second Sino-Japanese War (the Japanese invasion and occupation of China during World War II, 1937-45), ending in 1948, just before the founding of the People’s Republic.
In the first act of Teahouse, which takes place in 1898 (the eve of the Boxer Uprising), the year of reform and the ensuing crackdown (see note below), we see the plight China has been reduced to: a weakened state; an impoverished populace; foreign aggression on the rise; foreign goods, including the infamous commodity, opium, flooding the market. The peasantry, mainstay of the nation, is forced into bankruptcy and selling off their own children.
(note: The Hundred Days’ Reform, June-September 1898, was a failed effort by the Guangxu Emperor [1871-1908; reigned: 1875-1908] to institute sweeping social and institutional changes. To succeed, however, the emperor and his supporters had to remove the conservative Dowager Empress Cixi [1835-1908], who effectively controlled the government from 1861 to 1908, from power.
(The empress engineered a coup and the reform movement failed, resulting in the virtual imprisonment of the emperor and leaving China even more under the thumb of the dowager empress. Ironically, the reformers’ failure spurred China’s revolutionaries to greater effort, bringing first Sun Yat-sen’s Xinhai Revolution of 1911 that ousted the Qing Dynasty, and then the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949.)
The teahouse, which is plastered, in accordance with Lao She’s stage directions, with notices reading “Don’t Discuss Affairs of State,” is frequented by urban intellectuals and traders who benefit from and delight in the influx of imported foreign luxury goods while the poverty-stricken farm workers are ignored. One father, Sixth-Born Kang, regretfully sells his teenaged daughter, Kang Shunzi, to the Grand Eunuch Pang to be his wife because he can’t see any other way to feed her.
Residents in Peking, as exemplified by frequenters of the Yutai Teahouse, run by Wang Lifa, are apathetic to the disastrous national situation, but the discerning few, the better informed, begin to get involved. Some advocate political reform, trying to persuade the reigning emperor to head the movement; others pin their hopes on industrialization as the only way to bring the nation to prosperity and the people to affluence.
All these hopes are dashed after the crackdown. With the success of their coup, the die-hard ruling clique at the court is more arrogant than ever; even the eunuch, Pang, insists on the impossible: he wants to buy a young wife. The imperial secret police are more powerful than ever and the underworld barons are having their heyday. All this, of course, leads to the inevitable conclusion: The Great Qing Empire is finished.
The second act takes us twenty years later. (Only act 1 is given a specific year in the text, but the program for the Pan Asian Rep production puts act 2 in 1918.) The dynasty has fallen, a republic has been set up, but the people are worse off than ever.
In the Yutai Teahouse we see Manager Wang trying his best to keep up with the times, but the incessant civil wars waged by the warlords of different factions (Warlord Era, 1916-28), backed by Chinese imperialists and foreign powers, and the general anarchy and lawlessness makes his efforts totally futile. Wang Shufen, the manager’s wife, embraces the new Republic of China wholeheartedly and urges her husband to do so, too.
In the distance, however, we begin to hear the reverberations of revolution, young people, represented by the students, are on edge and fomenting a protest under the banner of patriotism and democracy.
Act 3 takes us another thirty years later (1948, according to Pan Asian Rep). After eight years of bitter war against the Japanese (Second Sino-Japanese War, 1937-45), the common people have hardly had time to celebrate China’s victory when the reactionary factions in the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, 1887-1975), strongly influenced by foreign interests, instigated an all-out civil war.
The political situation becomes even more oppressive and corrupt, and we see even in the Yutai Teahouse, usually a backwater gathering place, the seething discontent of the populace and the more vehement protests of the students.
Little Pockface Liu, the flesh merchant, plans to take over the Yutai with the blessing if the Kuomintang and turn it onto the center of his business—marking the end of the teahouse. Wang, Chang, and Qin have become penniless and old. They’re done, too, just like the old teahouse.
Lao had set up a somewhat macabre joke here. At the end of the play, the three poor, old men are drinking tea. Chang, who’s become a peanut vendor, manages to get some for their last cup of tea together. But the old men discover that they no longer have the teeth with which to chew the peanuts.
The men grab handfuls of imitation paper funeral money used at burials as a symbolic paying of the deceased’s moral debts and toss it around the teahouse as if they were at their own funerals. The upright and honest Wang, now a man of over 70 whose only ambition in life was survival, is finally reduced to despair and has already decided to hang himself.
Any discussion of whether Teahouse is counterrevolutionary or even seditious aside, Lao She himself said his aim was “symbolically burying the three historical periods presented in the play.” In so doing, he wrote, he showed the true conditions of the horrendous social order in the past fifty years.
The production style of Teahouse is normally naturalistic, though Lao salted the text with some decidedly unnaturalistic elements, many borrowed from Chinese opera, a very stylized theater form. The author acknowledged, “The play incorporates some new devices which go beyond the standard techniques that playgoers are familiar with.”
One technique Lao employed is the tradition of Chinese street theater, a form that portrays events of the day. Another non-naturalistic element is adapted from the acting method of Beijing opera, which is highly codified. “The actor, for instance, would stand in a special posture or gesture according to his role,” reported Kräuter in his article about the European tour. This “striking a pose,” as it’s called, was intended to make certain characters in the crowded and bustling teahouse attract the audience’s attention.
Because the act breaks have to be long so the actors can change their often elaborate costumes, Lao invented a character, Oddball Yang (who didn’t appear in the Pan Asian Rep production I saw), who stands before the main drape and sings clapper ballads, Chinese folk songs accompanied by wooden clappers. He sings between each act and as an epilogue.
Like the other characters, Oddball Yang ages as the decades pass and his appearance becomes more ragged as conditions in the country deteriorate. He recites doggerel about the historical and political background of each period and the rising and falling fortunes of Manager Wang and the other customers of the teahouse.
Because the naturalistic style of Teahouse isn’t traditional to Chinese theater—spoken drama (huaju – literally, ‘word drama’) isn’t only a late-comer to China, adopted in the early 20th century, but it was suppressed during the ten years of the Cultural Revolution as a foreign influence and didn’t resurge until the late 1970s—Kräuter found it “fascinating to hear how the actors and actresses . . . prepared” for their parts. Having had access to observe and interview the BPAT cast, he described some of the work (which Western actors will find familiar):
They met with old eunuchs who had been in the Imperial Court. They learned how to use snuff. They studied how people greeted each other before the Republic was set up in 1911 and the slightly pigeon-toed, bow-legged strut of the Imperial Wrestlers. They started wearing their long gowns at home and or even on the street in order to practice moving in the costumes of the characters.
Huang Zongluo, who plays the part of a Manchu bannerman and bird enthusiast [Second Elder Song or, in the Pan Asian production, Master Song], actually bought himself a bird and cage. [The Manchus are an ethnic group in China who established the Qing Dynasty and ruled the country. The Manchus divided their bureaucracy and army into divisions called “banners” because each was identified by a distinctive flag; the soldiers and bureaucrats were called “bannermen,” all entitled to a monthly stipend from the imperial government.] Lan Tianye, who plays the capitalist Qin [Zhongyi], visited former capitalists who had been against feudalism and studied their habits. In the first act, Qin and the eunuch Pang clash with each other. From the moment they appear, the audience must feel the tension between them. So both Tong Chao and Lan Tianye have concocted a story about an earlier encounter. In the market Qin bought a very costly bird, which Eunuch Pang also coveted. Thus the two actors build on this concrete quarrel between the two characters, who represent two different classes.
While preparing for his role as [teahouse] Manager Wang Lifa, Yu Shizhi recalled an old neighbor who had been a janitor at his primary school founded in 1893 before the start of the Reform Movement. Many former students later taught there, even the headmaster had been a former pupil. But the janitor always remained at his post, respected for his age and diligence. He moved very swiftly and always had his trouser legs tied at the bottom. When his hands were dirty, he would hold his palms far away from his gown, as Yu Shizhi does today on stage.
Lao She himself suggested Li Xiang for the part of the waiter Li San. Li Xiang was familiar with rickshaw-pullers, artisans and the like, because his relatives came from that class. He studied how waiters carried trays of food, poured tea, gave water to their customers’ birds or put their crickets out to sun.
The acting theories of Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938), the renowned Russian acting theorist, teacher, and stage director, were introduced into China in the ’30s, but didn’t become widely known until after the establishment of the PRC. What Kräuter described above is very reminiscent of some Stanislavsky techniques—and I suspect what the BPAT actors were doing was based on some study of Stanislavsky’s ABC’s.
(If you didn’t guess from its name—the Beijing People’s Art Theater—the BPAT was deliberately modeled on Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theater, according to Shiao-ling Yu’s essay “Politics and Theatre in the PRC: Fifty Years of Teahouse on the Chinese Stage” [Asian Theatre Journal, Spring 2013].)
The structure of Teahouse is essentially a string of pearls—a very short string, since the pearls are basically the three acts. The string is made up of a trio of characters who appear in all three acts; the rest of the characters figure in only one or sometimes two acts, though they may have echoes that show up in later acts—such as children or other such connections. For instance, Ying Ruocheng played the pimp Pockface Liu in acts 1 and 2, then returned as his son, Pockface Liu Jr. (aka: Little Pockface Liu), in act 3.
As I noted earlier, there is one more character who exists all through the play: the teahouse. It, too, changes as the decades pass, but it’s more than the appearance and décor of the place: its very existence alters, just as the people who come there do. The Yutai is also a force of continuity.
Lao She says in the play that the teahouse is “indeed an important place,” adding that “it could even be reckoned a kind of cultural centre.” It’s a symbol of the entire country, “a microcosm of society as a whole.”
The main character is Wang Lifa, the manager of the Yutai. The world of the teahouse is seen through his eyes and is reflected in his experiences. Along with Wang, the characters of Fourth Elder Chang (just Master Chang in the Pan Asian’s version), described as “an habitué” of the teahouse, and Qin Zhongyi, “Wang Lifa’s landlord,” owner of the premises of the Yutai, provide a sense of continuity over the arc of such a diffuse play.
In addition, these three, who age from 20’s and 30’s to 70’s and 80’s as the play progresses through the societal changes depicted, generate a sense of comfort and also serve as commentators who connect and reflect on each era.
Of course, for many Chinese viewers of the play back in the ’50s and ’60s (the last performance of Teahouse in China before the start of the Cultural Revolution was in 1963), there was also the connection of a shared history they were seeing reenacted. Present day Chinese, especially overseas Chinese or descendants of Chinese emigrants—large percentages of U.S. audiences were Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans—who came to performances here in 1983, 1986. 2005, or 2016 (Vancouver, British Columbia) might not have that link, however, and be nearly in the same boat as we non-Chinese Americans.
Shiao-ling Yu, in his essay on how politics reflected on Teahouse, makes another point that we non-Chinese are likely to miss. Part of the popularity of Teahouse through the decades, he suggests, is the recognition by audiences of the parallels between the major events in the play and circumstances in the China of the time of the productions which the spectators have experienced themselves.
Yu points out, for instance, how the arrests of Chang and his friend Second Elder Song would have been very familiar to members of the audience in 1979, right after the Cultural Revolution, when the same thing had happened to them or their friends and relatives. Yu notes other parallels—which Lao She couldn’t have intended since he wrote the play almost a decade before the Cultural Revolution started. Similar juxtapositions had occurred when the play was mounted in 1958 and 1963—but viewers like me wouldn’t have picked up on them.
Establishing continuity is important dramaturgically in Teahouse because of its loose structure. In addition to the lack of a central plot, just many historical elements with no arc or through-line; the huge cast; and the evanescent nature of the characters—here in one act, gone in the next—the play calls for costumes to change totally from act to act as decades pass, from the long gown of the late Qing Dynasty in act 1 to the increasingly modern dress of the ROC and, finally, to clothes that emulate Hollywood flash in act 3. (The Pan Asian production used more than 200 costumes.)
But more than that, the characters’ personal behavior evolves with each passing era. Characters of the Qing Dynasty exhibit traditional gestures like kneeling to greet aristocrats, while the ROC denizens of the Yutai make pragmatic and unembellished gestures. In the final, pre-PRC act, young women amble and smoke cigarettes like the Western movie stars they see on their movie screens, and the young men assume a cheeky, self-confident air.
Beside being an acting challenge—it’s hard enough playing a period piece, but it’s exponentially harder to play a three-period piece!—these changes weaken structural continuity and through-line. From a performance standpoint, Teahouse is a tour de force. (Not to mention that most of the actors play two and three characters a night.)
Lao She’s Teahouse isn’t without problems, of course. I won’t discuss the issue of supertitles and production in a language unfamiliar to most North American audiences. The performance I saw was, as I’ve said, in English translation—though I have written about problems with supertitles before on ROT.
Leaving that aside, I’ve already discussed the diffuseness of the play and, as readers can guess, it makes the play hard to follow or even to stay engaged with at times. The number of characters, which is an aspect of this characteristic, makes it difficult to keep them all sorted out; no sooner did I get a handle on one figure than he or she dropped out of the drama.
Many of these characters are so fleeting as to hardly even make a presence. Wang Shufen, the teahouse manager’s wife, is one of these. Perhaps predictably, the CCTV (China Central Television) adaptation, which ran for 39 episodes in 2010, fleshed out many of these characters, including Wang Shufen, as part of its “opening up” of the play.
Some viewers may find a problem with Lao’s deliberate refusal to take an explicit stand on the message of his play. (This, of course, was the complaint of Lao’s critics in the Cultural Revolution.) As I’ve already observed, the dramatist lays out the events of the play as experienced by the customers and staff of the Yutai Teahouse, even showing us the consequences of those events on the lives of his characters, and then expects us to come to our own conclusions.
It's not an uncommon tactic for Western playwrights; indeed, it’s very Brechtian—but it bothers some theatergoers and reviewers. (I think of Emily Mann’s Execution of Justice [1985; Broadway, 1986] which exercised some viewers because Mann never made a direct statement on whether she thought Dan White’s sentence for killing Harvey Milk was right or wrong.)
Probably the thorniest dramaturgical problem with Teahouse is that at three hours, there are many dry patches, scenes of varying lengths where little or nothing of dramatic significance seems to be happening. Even in English, this can be enervating, and I had trouble staying in the play at times. In Chinese, I can imagine this would be many times more of a problem.
I hasten to add, however, that the rest of the play, with its almost constant life panorama, more than makes up for this deficiency. The play is such an incredible snapshot of a world gone by, with its combination of realism and exoticism, that it’s little wonder that Teahouse has become such a classic at home and a major curiosity here and elsewhere abroad.
There is an element in the play, though, on which readers may have picked up. The habitués of the Yutai Teahouse have a tendency to blame “the foreigners” for all of China’s woes. I believe that Lao She means some of this to be ironic, and some of it is simply an accurate representation of a sentiment that was abroad in the land.
Some of it was true as well. But it should also be pointed out that Lao wasn’t innocent of a certain xenophobia—righteously come-by, perhaps. In 1900, Lao, just an infant at the time, lost his father, an imperial guardsman, in a street battle with foreign troops during the Boxer Uprising, a painful loss he carried through his childhood and after.
From his mother, Lao heard the stories of the atrocities committed by the foreign soldiers, how an Italian squad invaded his home after his father was killed, bayonetted the family dog, and ransacked the house. In Teahouse, the character of Fourth Elder Chang reenacts this family tragedy.
The New York Times’ Mel Gussow characterized the 1983 Pan Asian Rep première as “an ambitious group portrait of China” and said that despite “awkward stretches,” the presentation provided “a lively performance arena” for the Pan Asian actors. In addition to some “deft cameo performances,” Gussow concluded that “the eagerness is infectious and Tisa Chang’s staging blends the company into a uniform, understated style of performance.”
Of the BPAT productions, reviewers were almost universally laudatory. At a 2001 performance in Beijing’s Capital Theater, the company’s longtime home (where the 1958 world première of Teahouse was mounted), Sheila Melvin cited “stellar acting” and “a spectacular set” in the New York Times.
In October 2005, Peter Marks declared in the Washington Post, “‘Teahouse’ makes a fine first impression,” adding that after “the curtain rises, . . . what it reveals delights the eye.” Warning that the play “can be slow going,” the reviewer went on to say that “the talent pool is deep and the cast impressive.” He summed up with: “Despite some dry patches, ‘Teahouse’ is an oasis for anyone with a thirst for voices they rarely get to hear.”
The Kennedy Center performance was not only the U.S. Chinese-language première of Teahouse, but it was also the début of BPAT in the United States. After Thanksgiving, the production moved to New York City for its and the company’s first appearances there. The production, sponsored by Yangtze Repertory Theatre of America, was staged in the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at downtown Manhattan’s Pace University.
In the New York Times, Wilborn Hampton averred that “Lao She’s development of his characters over two generations . . . makes [Teahouse] exciting theater. A stellar cast of about 30 give a brilliant master class in ensemble acting.”
For a review in the Straits Times of a 2015 production in Singapore, Ho Ai Li offered a confession: “When I see the phrase ‘China’s tumultuous history’ in programme notes, I often feel suspicion coming on. . . . But I feel tears well up at the end of Teahouse.”
The final actions of Lao She’s play, the reviewer explained, “make for a very powerful ending to a well-acted and insightful play that overflows with humanity.” He noted at the end, “On its opening night . . ., it drew many standing ovations from an audience that included” many Singaporean dignitaries.
In an unusual occurrence, BPAT sent an avant-garde adaptation of Teahouse to France (as La Maison de thé) for the 2019 Avignon Festival (4-23 July). Directed by Meng Jinghui on a “huge metallic structure with a circular wheel in the middle”—which the director characterized as “expressionistic”; in the words of Emilie Proudhon-Dumesny on the website Plays To See, it’s “an avant-garde play as we rarely see.” (The bulk of the review is in English, but one passage is in French. The translation of that section is mine.)
As the director tests “both the spectators and the actors simultaneously without ever losing intensity or meaning,” asserted Proudhon-Dumesny, “Lao She’s text finds in this staging a contemporary echo that pays tribute to its subversive nature.”
The reviewer explained that “the structure symbolises the tea house that gives its name to the play.” He reported that “the scenography . . . strikes by its excessiveness. . . . Some actors are in the wheel, some are on the floor.” The lights “are both colourful and violent, creating a unique aesthetic.” Proudhon-Dumesny observed that “the shadows of the actors are as important as the light on their faces.”
In the review-writer’s description, the production sounds remarkably Grand Guignol: “blood is spilled more often than tea”; “[t]he actors’ exhaustion can be heard in their voices, breaking from too much screaming”; “one of them tries to stay on his feet in the giant wheel that makes him look like a hamster determined to rebel against the system”; “shocking language and imagery” are used; there are “several faked suicides, people eating babies, buckets of fake blood being spilled on everyone . . ., and a man sawing a mannequin in two parts.”
“The spectators themselves are questioned and mocked,” but Proudhon-Dumesny told us that his “Chinese neighbor” was laughing. “The public’s reaction to the play proves that it is still extremely relevant today” noted the reviewer.
Proudhon-Dumesny concluded:
Lao She’s text is adapted to our contemporary, eclectic culture, which mixes pop-rock music and a rap summary of the play. Meng Jinghui dresses a bitter caricature of our world, ironically paying homage to Coca-Cola and parodying a McDonald’s drive-in when a customer says: “I want a piece of freedom.”
Teahouse is an ode to rebellion and subversion, even during the final applause. The classic final salute transforms into what seems to be the beginning of a rave party. The actors and the director dance frantically to loud bass music, and when the wood panels close, they open a door through it to keep on thanking the public.
It doesn’t sound like the Teahouse I know from the 1983 production I saw and the script I read—but apparently it worked; at least Emilie Proudhon-Dumesny thought so. But, then, a really good classic play can withstand almost any manipulation, I’ve found, and remain unharmed—even if the manhandling turns out to be nonsense. Sometimes it even turns out to be revelatory. (See my post “Similes, Metaphors—And The Stage” [18 September 2009] and “Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?” by Robert Brustein [10 March 2011].)
Meng’s adaptation premièred in Wuzhen in Zhejiang Province in October 2018. In an article (not a review) in China Daily, Chen Nan reported that the production met with “mixed reviews.” Chen quoted Meng as calling his take on Teahouse “a spiritual visit to Lao She,” but the reporter observed, “Some say it's difficult to understand since the script departs so much from the original.”
As I’ve already mentioned, Teahouse was filmed in 1982 (as Cha Guan). It was directed by Xie Tian, who also wrote the screenplay. It was filmed in Mandarin in Beijing at the Beijing Film Studio. The cast is drawn from the members of BPAT, including many of the original 1958 and 1979 casts. Like the stage play, the movie takes place within the Yutai Teahouse.
Twenty-eight years later, CCTV adapted Lao’s play into a 39-episode television miniseries (16-28 July 2010). Directed by He Qun and written by Yang Guo-qiang and Ye Guang-qin, the cast again were members of BPAT. Recorded at the China Television Production Center, the TV series opened the play up and staged scenes outside the Yutai. (For instance, in what would have been act 2, Wang Lifa goes to a foreign-run teahouse to check out the competition.) Characters who made only brief appearances in the play, such as Wang’s wife, Wang Shufen, are fleshed out into featured roles.
There’s also an adaptation of the play for Beijing opera, the most popular form of theater in China, unique to Beijing. The play was adapted by Wang Xinji with music composed by Dai Yisheng; the first production in 1998, which won several awards, was directed by Gu Wei. Teahouse is sung in Beijing dialect by the Beijing Opera Troupe.
When Teahouse was revived three years after the Gang of Four fell out of power and the Cultural Revolution ended, many fans of Lao She saw it as a triumph for the popular writer. He was dubbed a “People’s Artist” and a “Great Master of Language.”
But perhaps as the real triumphal honor accorded the dramatist, the Lao She Teahouse, a tourist-oriented performance eatery, was opened in Beijing in 1988. The teahouse presents performances every day of folk arts, opera, acrobatics, magic, puppetry, and face-changing.
(Face-changing is a traditional Chinese dramatic art that’s part of Chinese opera performance. Performers wear brightly colored costumes and move to quick, dramatic music. They also wear vividly colored masks of characters from the opera, which they change from one face to another almost instantaneously with the swipe of a fan, a movement of the head, or wave of the hand.)
Now, the Lao She Teahouse in Beijing presents performances of Beijing opera. Lao She’s best-known play, Teahouse has been made into a Beijing opera. I wonder: can you go to the Lao She Teahouse and see a performance of Lao She’s Teahouse?
You’ve just
crossed over into . . . the Twilight Zone!
(doo doo DO doo . . . .)
