ASIA : Beijing’s Avant-Garde Theater Experiments With Success

On the stage at the warehouse theater, the seven actors performed for more than two hours by using the same two words--”I love”--several thousand times until the words were turned inside out and rendered practically meaningless.

Eight television sets glowed on the spare stage with the silent images of imported commercials for Lady Clairol hair products and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Film clips of the late Chairman Mao Tse-tung were projected on one wall. Then came an upside-down North Korean travel film.

At one point, the action on stage broke down into an exhausting game of leapfrog.

This is a far cry from “The Red Detachment of Women”--China’s heroic theatrical mainstay during the Cultural Revolution. But the Beijing Experimental Drama Troupe’s production of “I Love XXX” represents a revival of avant-garde theater in the Chinese capital in recent months.

Viewed in combination with China’s internationally celebrated “Fifth Generation” films and a handful of successful modern artists, the avant-garde theater scene is another example of the tentative reflowering of Chinese artistic expression five years after the army crackdown on the Tian An Men Square democracy protesters.

In fact, one of the most effective scenes comes when the four actors and three actresses repeat in increasingly rapid cadence, “I Love Tian An Men.”

There is nothing overtly political about that--except that, repeated fast in Chinese, “ wo ai Tian An Men “ has a very clear English sound: “Why Tian An Men?”

Only a few blocks away from the Chinese Performance Company practice house where “I Love XXX” was being staged, director Lin Zhaohua presented his unusual, experimental interpretation of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” before a large audience at the Capital Theater, one of Beijing’s largest.

Considered the pioneer of Beijing experimental theater, Lin has built a considerable following among intellectuals, many of whom delight in the director’s thinly veiled political allegories. In July, for example, he packed the Central Drama Academy with his production of Goethe’s “Faust.”

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Few people living in contemporary China could miss the aptness of Lin’s choice of plays: the story of a dying autocratic leader who presided over the economic revival of an empire.

Paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, 90 years old and ailing, is widely credited with reviving the moribund Chinese economy by opening it up to the West. But for dedicated Maoists here, Deng’s embrace of a market-driven economy is nothing short of a Faustian contract with the devil.

The play’s translator, Li Jianming, told a reporter for the Far Eastern Economic Review magazine that the work represented “the ambition, the acquisitiveness, the insatiable appetite, the gnawing compromises that have to be made” under the new economic order.

The experimental directors themselves usually shy away from political analysis of their works.

“As a drama director,” said “I Love XXX” director Meng Jinghui, “you are not just a politician. You can’t go around every day collecting slogans to attract foreigners so you will look like some kind of democratic knight.”

Their plays still must pass scrutiny by Propaganda Ministry censors. After viewing “I Love XXX,” for example, the censors declared that it was unsuitable for performance in a mainstream theater, and the performance troupe could not charge admission.

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Nonetheless, the young players in “I Love XXX” were ecstatic the other evening when they met with a foreign reporter after concluding a performance. Gleefully, they recounted how an older woman in the audience stood up and said, “I wish you were dead!”

In the world of experimental theater, this was just the kind of reaction they were hoping for. A young actress in the play quickly rose to the challenge, staring back at the woman and replying, “I love you for saying that.”