Drama of
the "Wounds" and Exposure
Experimental Drama
Crisis in Drama
Little Theater and Mini Drama
Theater of Dissent
Conclusions
Bibliography
Seven years before the
founding of the People's Republic, at the Yanan Forum on Literature and Art
in 1942, Mao Zedong defined the function of literature and art as serving the
needs of the Communist revolution and the Communist Party. Since then, literature
and art have become inseparable from politics. Drama, because of its mass audience
and propaganda value, has been affected by political events and changing Party
policies even more than fiction and poetry. This was particularly true during
the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) when Jiang Qing's (Mao's wife) "model
revolutionary operas" were used to wage ideological battles. During this
decade of "putting politics in command," both traditional Chinese
opera and Western-style spoken drama were banned because they represented feudalism
and Western bourgeois liberalism.
The
end of the Cultural Revolution and its ultra-leftist policies marked the beginning
of a new era in Chinese drama. Traditional opera made a comeback; spoken drama
revived its legacy as a vehicle for social criticism. Opening to the outside
world and introduction of modern Western drama provided Chinese dramatists with
inspirations and models for their own creations. The economic reform redefined
the role of drama in Chinese society. This article will examine how these social,
economic, and cultural forces have produced a new drama in the post-Mao period.
Drama of the "Wounds" and Exposure < back to top >
Chinese drama in the late
1970s was closely related to the development in fiction: first to appear was
the "literature of the wounded" which portrayed the "wounds"
caused by the Cultural Revolution; then came "literature of exposure"
which exposed government corruption. Two well-know examples of the "wounded"
plays are In a Land of Silence (Yu wu sheng chu) by Zong Fuxian and Loyal Hearts
(Danxin pu) by Su Shuyang. Both plays were great stage successes although they
were conventional in themes and techniques. The enthusiastic responses they
generated were not so much due to their artistic merits as to their emotional
appeal to the audience. After going through ten years of nightmare, Chinese
people longed for some kind of catharsis.
Reexamination of
the Cultural Revolution experiences also led Chinese writers and playwrights
to look for the causes of this national disaster in the workings of the Party
and government. Sha Yexin's If I Were Real (Jiaru wu shi zhendi, 1979) is perhaps
the most successful play satirizing Party bureaucracy produced in the post-Mao
period. By borrowing the device of an unknown posing as a government official
from Gogol's play The Inspector General, Sha created a Chinese version of the
impostor's story: an educated youth impersonating the son of a high-ranking
cadre in order to be transferred back to the city. If I Were Real went further
than the "literature of the wounded" in its examination of the Chinese
social and political conditions. It also set a new trend of featuring anti-heroes
as protagonists--a radical departure from the larger-than-life heroic characters
in Jiang Qing's revolutionary operas.
Experimental Drama < back
to top >
The "wounded"
and expose plays of the late 1970s succeeded in breaking down certain "taboos"
in subject matter, but in dramaturgy, they do not differ very much from plays
produced in the previous thirty years. It remained for a new generation of playwrights
to take Chinese drama in a new direction in the 1980s. The spoken drama in China,
since its birth in the early twentieth-century, has long been dominated by the
realism and socialist realism of Ibsen and Stanislavsky. Introduction of modern
Western drama into China in the Post-Mao era provided the stimulus for the creation
of a new non-realist theater. Contemporary Chinese dramatists' search for new
forms of dramatic expression led them to the "epic theater" of Bertold
Brecht and the theater of the absurd.
They also rediscovered
the symbolic mode of presentation used in classical Chinese musical drama. Modernist
techniques combined with the conventions of traditional Chinese opera brought
about changes in the way plays were written and performed. Episodic structures
replaced the well-made plots; linear unfolding of stories was substituted by
multiple lines of development in which past and present were juxtaposed. Greater
emphasis on the characters' psychology was achieved by means of interior monologues
and stream of consciousness techniques. The "fourth wall" of the realist
theater was worn down, and the stage-setting was reduced to a minimum to resemble
that of the traditional opera. The explosion of experimental works in the 1980s
made this decade the most exciting period in Chinese drama since the founding
of the People's Republic.
Gao Xinjian (b. 1940)
is the most innovative playwright of spoken drama in the post-Mao era. A student
of French literature, he wrote the first Chinese absurdist play, Bus Stop (Chezhan).
In this play seven characters, who represent a cross-section of Chinese urban
society, wait for a bus to take them to town but the buses never stop for them.
Bus Stop shares with Waiting for Godot the central theme of waiting and the
futility of doing so. Martin Esslin observed that the act of waiting is "an
essential and characteristic aspect of the human condition" and that "in
the act of waiting we experience the flow of time in its purest, most evident
form . . . we are confronted with the action of time itself" (Esslin, 1969,
29). Gao Xingjian's treatment of time is perhaps the most absurd element in
his play. As the passengers wait, they discover to their horror that months
and years fly by with the ticking of a character's watch. Caught in this rapid
flight of time, they no longer know how long they have been waiting or what
year it is. But the effect if time is evident: they appear visibly older and
worry about not reaching their destination before they run out of time. As the
buses speed past and the watch ticks away, they experience the same kind of
anxiety and despair as Vladimir and Estragon. Gao Xingjian offers a little glimmer
of hope in the character of the Silent Man, who walks to town while the others
wait. But his action fails to inspire any followers. At the end of the play,
the seven characters still cannot decide what to do.
The language of Bus Stop
reveals another similarity between this play and the theater of the absurd.
Martin Esslin noted that it is not the subject matter that defines this theater,
but its form. While writers such as Camus and Sartre also share a belief in
the absurdity of the human condition, they express their philosophy in a logical,
rational way. "The theater of the absurd, on the other hand, tends toward
a radical devaluation of language" (Esslin, 1969, 7). This is true, or
at least partially true, with Bus Stop. The dialogue begins on a realistic level
as the characters chat and argue with each other to pass time; but as anxiety
mounts with the passage of time, communication breaks down. They talk to themselves
or speak all at once in a kind of "polyphonic dialogue" as the author
calls it. Gao Xingjian describes the incoherent speech of the characters as
"uttered simply for the sake of talking--just like waiting for the bus
without knowing why" (Yu, 1996, 287). Their meaningless speech and their
act of waiting are both expressions of the absurd human condition.
Bus Stop touched
off a heated debate in Chinese cultural circles when it was performed in Beijing
in 1983. Veteran playwrights Wu Zuguang and Cao Yu praised the artistic achievements
and innovations of this play. Many other critics, however, judged it seriously
flawed because it betrayed a lack of faith in the socialist system and imitated
the decadent theater of the absurd.
Gao Xingjian is no
slavish imitator of Western drama. He believes that China's own theatrical tradition--not
only the opera, but also primitive religious rituals, folk songs and dances,
storytelling, puppet theater, etc.-- can be tapped to broaden the aesthetical
range of the spoken drama. His play Wild Man (Yeren) represents his attempt
to create a new kind of drama bridging modernism and primitivism. Some of China's
most ancient myths and legends serve as a backdrop to highlight the problems
of contemporary Chinese society: marriage breakup, political chaos in the aftermath
of the Cultural Revolution, destruction of the environment. Spoken dialogue,
singing, dancing, and recitation are used to produce what Gao called a "polyphonic
epic." Despite the visual appeal of its stage sets, the play suffers from
lack of a clear focus--its loosely structured thirty-odd episodes fail to become
an integrated whole.
Gao Xingjian's experimentation
made him a controversial figure in China, and his new works were not allowed
to be performed after 1986. In 1987 he settled in Paris where he continues to
write in Chinese and French. He was awarded the Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts
et des Lettres by the French Government in 1992.
Wang Peigong (b.
1940) is another playwright whose experimental modernist play WM rocked the
Chinese stage in the mid-1980s. The puzzling title is an abbreviation of the
word "women" which means "we" in Chinese. The two letters
also resemble a pictograph of two men, one standing upright, the other on his
head. These layers of meaning symbolize a generation of young people's struggles
to find meaning in their lives during and after the Cultural Revolution. Loss
of youthful ideals is poignantly represented by the Song of the Young Pioneers,
which the seven characters sing in ACT I and again at the end of the play. WM
goes further than any literary work in recent memory in challenging official
discourse. Its dialogue is bold and sharp, playful and irreverent, with no bars
on vulgarity or politically sensitive topics. The imaginative staging of this
play, which made use of both modernist and traditional Chinese theatrical techniques,
also distinguished it as a new form of Chinese spoken drama. In the eyes of
the authorities, WM is a subversive play because of its ideological contents.
The fact that Wang Peigong was a member of the Chinese Air Force when he wrote
this play made his offense more serious. The play was banned after a very short
engagement in Beijing and Shanghai.
A supporter of the democracy
movement, Wang Peigong resigned his Party membership in May, 1989, and was briefly
under arrest after the Tiananmen massacre. Since then, no play by him has appeared
to capture national attention.
Traditional music drama
also broke new grounds in the post-Mao period, led by the efforts of innovative
playwrights of various regional operas. Chief among them is Wei Minglun (b.
1941), who specializes in Sichuan opera. His opera Pan Jinlian is a reworking
of the classical story about this most notorious adulterous wife and husband-murderer
in Chinese literature. The author's reinterpretation of Pan as a victim of a
patriarchal society is a reflection of the condition of women in China today.
When she is tried in the People's Court, despite the intervention of a sympathetic
female judge, the outcome of the trial is the same as in traditional fiction.
The Marriage Law of the People's Republic is powerless to free her from her
loveless marriage, or to save her from being killed by her brother-in-law in
revenge.
Wei Minglun not only invested
an old tale with new meaning, he also experimented with new techniques. A most
important innovation in this opera is its juxtaposition of characters, literatures
and cultures, both Chinese and foreign. The action leaps across time and cultural
barriers, and characters include a wide range of personages drawn from history,
contemporary society, and literary works. Thus, an empress of the Tang dynasty,
a female Chief Justice of the People's Court, Jia Baoyu from The Dream of the
Red Chamber, Leo Tolstoy's tragic heroine Anna Karenina, etc. all appear on
the same stage. These "characters outside the play" function chiefly
as commentators. They provide different perspectives for the audience to think
about the transformation of an innocent young woman to an adulteress and murderer.
Pan Jinlian was greeted
by both controversies and enthusiastic responses. Wei Minglun's combination
of tradition and modernity breathes new life into an old art form. His treatment
of the Pan Jinlian story shows that an ancient tale can still have relevance
to a contemporary audience. His experimentation was hailed as the "Wei
Minglun phenomenon." It is a phenomenon that will have broad implications
for the future for traditional drama in China.
Crisis
in Drama < back
to top >
China's rapid economic
development has created a vastly different social environment in which drama
and all forms of serious art must make adjustments to survive. Chinese drama
has experienced a double crisis since the late 1980s: loss of state subsidies
for theater companies and loss of audience to movie, television, and other popular
forms of entertainment. With diminishing state support, companies have to search
for other sources of funding, such as corporate sponsorship. Organizational
reforms are carried out to cut expenses and to make theater companies more competitive
in the market-place. Economics has replaced politics as the dominant influence
on the performing arts.
A more serious problem than
lack of funding is lack of audience, since this problem strikes at the very
heart of the drama's reason to exist as expressed in the truism "there
can be no drama without an audience." Growing prosperity has created a
new lifestyle and new taste in entertainment. When people go to the theater
nowadays, they expect to be entertained, not indoctrinated. Drama has been slow
to respond to this change and shed its image as an instrument of political propaganda.
To drum up support for drama, Chinese government and other organizations hand
out annual awards to playwrights and performers; they sponsor conferences, workshops,
and drama festivals every year. These activities cannot hide the fact that the
theaters are empty. The crisis facing theater companies is summed up in the
saying, "More performances more loss, fewer performances less loss, no
performances no loss." Under these circumstances, it is small wonder that
playwrights and actors are turning to film and television.
With a dwindling
audience and demoralized professionals, is there a future for Chinese drama?
Can it survive and develop in the market economy? The current crisis has triggered
a debate about the nature of drama: Is drama a commodity? Some believe that
to regard drama as a mere consumer product will lower its artistic value. This
is especially true for classical drama such as Peking opera and the older and
more refined Kunqu. Others point out that drama possesses both commercial and
cultural values and the two need be mutually exclusive. A flourishing economy
may even be good for drama. The way out for Chinese drama, according to one
school of thought, is to have two kinds of theater existing side by side: an
elite theater that preserves the classical works like museum pieces, and a commercial
theater that caters to the tastes of consumers. Still others favor a closer
integration with economy and the needs of the audience. For them the question
is not whether drama should be a part of the market but how.
Little
Theater and Mini Drama < back
to top >
The Little Theater, which
was first introduced into China in the 1920s, is revived in the post-Mao era
as a strategy to cut down production costs and to win the support of a smaller
but loyal group of audience. The small and intimate stage of the Little Theater
shortens the physical and psychological distances between the actors and the
audience. Audience participation is encouraged to make theater-goers feel like
a part of the performance. In the performance of Owls in the Room (Wuli de maotaoying),
for example, audiences all put on an owl mask and a black cape as they were
led into a dark room, thus transforming them from mere spectators to characters
in the play. This sense of participation is what the theater companies hope
will bring back the audience.
In contrast to the
heroic, revolutionary epics of the past thirty years, the Little Theater offers
plays that deal with people's private lives and personal concerns in a rapidly
changing society. The Lady Who Stays Behind (Liushou nushi, 1990) produced by
Shanghai People's Art Theater, is such a play. It is a study of a social phenomenon
that has swept over every corner in China: the rush to go abroad. The husbands
and wives who stay behind have become a special class of people with their special
problems and mentalities. The male and female protagonists in this play enter
into a kind of relationship that they call "lovers by contract" during
their spouses' absence. When their contract expires and they prepare to go to
America to join their mates, the woman discovers that she is pregnant. The playwright
passes no judgment on the characters' actions but quietly conveys their sense
of longing, confusion and sadness. This personal tragedy about emotional pain
and moral dilemma touched a responsive chord in the Chinese audience, and the
play was a box office success.
Experimentation,
which is the hallmark of the Little Theater worldwide, is also a salient feature
of the Chinese Little Theater. A younger generation of Chinese dramatists found
Little Theater an ideal medium to try out new ideas. Gao Xingjian's play Alarm
Signal (Juedui xinhao, 1982), which is a psychological study of an unemployed
youth taking part in a train robbery, marked the beginning of the Little Theater
movement in the post-Mao period. Under the direction of Lin Zhaohua, the characters'
memories, imaginations, and subconscious thoughts are juxtaposed with their
actual activities, thus mental images are transformed into stage actions. Gao's
second play, Bus Stop, also directed by Lin Zhaohua, was again staged in the
small theater-in-the-round studio of the Capital Theater in Beijing. Another
generation of dramatists has followed Gao and Lin to keep the spirit of the
Little Theater alive.
While Little Theater
is the favorite of the intellectuals and theatrical professionals, mini drama
(xiju xiaopin) is very popular with the masses. As a kind of intellectual fast
food, this new drama meets the needs of the new economic age. When Deng Xiaoping
launched the economic reform in 1979 he told the Chinese people that to get
rich is glorious. Since then, the entire nation has been engaged in this glorious
pursuit of making money. Even the intellectual community, the last stronghold
against commercialism, is being swallowed up by this irresistible economic tide.
Prestigious universities knock down their walls to open shops, and professors
"take the plunge" to go into business. With everybody busy making
money, who would have the time to watch a long-winded Peking opera or a kunqu
performance? Traditional operas are now performed mostly for the benefit of
foreign tourists who delight in the acrobatic skills of the Chinese actors,
and an evening's program usually consists of short excerpts of fighting scenes.
The spoken drama does not fare much better either. The modern masterpieces of
Cao Yu (1910-1999) and Lao She (1899-1966) are rarely performed except at drama
festivals. What the Chinese audience wants is something short, fast, and entertaining,
that can help them unwind after a hard day's work. Mini drama, with an average
running time of fifteen minutes and packed with laughter, answers their call.
Since its debut in 1982, it has become a regular feature on television programs,
especially the New Year Eve's gala broadcast to a nationwide audience. Television,
the powerful rival of drama, has become an unexpected ally in promoting this
newly emergent dramatic form.
The term xiaopin is borrowed
from the name of a kind of short and familiar prose that Chinese literati used
to expressed their personal views and feelings. In performance, mini drama shares
some similarity with the popular form of storytelling called "comic dialogue"
or xiansheng--both reply on wit and humor to deliver their message. Most of
the mini dramas are comical satires such as the skit Birth Control Guerrilla
(Chaosheng youjidui). This piece dramatizes the plight of one couple trying
to escape China's one-child policy. They run from city to city with the director
of the neighborhood committee in hot pursuit, and in every city the wife gives
birth to a child.
The consequence of China's current birth control policy is the subject of another
play called Who Will be My Wife (Sui lai zuo qizi)? The play takes place in
the year 2020, by that time Chinese men so outnumber women that the way to get
a wife is to buy a robot. A tall, handsome, over-thirty business executive is
shown various robot models as his future wife: the domestic type, the romantic
type, the intellectual type, etc. All the models are beautiful and they each
demonstrate the skills they have been programmed to perform. During their demonstration,
one model suddenly acts like she is having an epileptic seizure. The man is
frightened out of his wits despite the assurance of the saleslady that it is
a mechanical malfunction that can be easily fixed. The would-be husband finally
summons enough courage to ask the saleslady to marry him. She replies, "I'm
the newest model of high-intelligence robots. You have to order my type from
the factory." The man falls to the ground and delivers his punch line:
"Who Will Be My Wife?"
As the above examples
illustrate, serious problems are often treated in an amusing way in mini drama.
This combination of entertainment and social commentary greatly appeals to the
Chinese audience. But the popularity of mini drama may also become its downfall
as too many mediocre works flood the stage.
Theater of Dissent < back
to top >
Among the many theater
companies in China, the Garage Theater (Xiju Chejian) founded by Mou Sen in
1993 is the only fully independent company. It receives no state support and
therefore can only mount low-budget productions using amateur actors and borrowed
stages. Its audience consists mainly of college teachers and students, and people
from the theater and other art circles. Yet this small underground company shows
what theater can be outside the mainstream, state-sponsored productions.
A student of literature,
Mou Sen got his start in theater by working in a student drama group while in
college. Dissatisfied with Stanislavsky's system for actor training used in
the official academies, Mou set up his Garage Theater to carry out his theatrical
experimentation. The play File Zero (Ling Dang'an), premiered at the Kunsten
Festival des Artes in Brussels in May 1994 and toured to fifteen cities in Europe
and Canada, is his best-known work.
The play was inspired by
a documentary poem of the same title, in which the poet Yu Jian describes a
nightmarish existence in a totalitarian state reminiscent of George Orwell's
1984. In such a state, people's identities are determined by the classified
files that government maintains on them throughout their lifetimes. Written
in fragmented syntax, the poem catalogues what information the government has
amassed on its citizens such as the following entry on a 30-year-old man: "His
30 years one bag in 1800 cabinets which a key is in control Not really thick
this guy is young only 50 pages just exceed 40 thousand words . . . . People
base on this to regard him as comrade issue him documents salary recognize his
sex" (Mou, 1996, 11). When files are lost or destroyed, people cease to
exist, they become file zero.
Taking the theme
of dehumanized existence as his organizing principle, Mou Sen structured his
play with three "file" stories. In the first story, a film maker tells
the audience about his relationship with his father based on his own childhood
experience. In his eyes, his father was such a colorless, boring, timid person
who worked as an accountant, the complete antithesis of the hero a little boy
needed for his growing up. As it turned out, his father had been a landlord
and a pilot in the Chinese Nationalist air force. Because of this background,
he was sent to a farm for reeducation during the Cultural Revolution. The son's
discovery made him both proud and ashamed of his father. By the time he entered
middle school, he came face to face with his own "file" for the first
time--he was required to declare his family background in a form he filled out.
His mother instructed him to always write "clerk" under the heading
of family background for all the forms that he would fill out in the future.
She told him that "clerk" was not a very good family background but
it was not the worst. While he was stuck with the label of "clerk,"
many of his classmates had more enviable labels such as "farmer,"
"cadre," "worker" etc. This story testifies to the power
of official dossiers on Chinese citizens. They are not only responsible for
their own deeds, but also carry the "sins" of their parents to the
end of their lives.
The second story,
also about emotional trauma and self-discovery, is also taken from real life.
A young student recounts his love affair with a woman student, who eventually
rejected him and married an American and emigrated to the U.S. His unrequited
love filled him with self doubt: he did not fall in love again and wondered
whether married life had any meaning. The student reads his story from a piece
of paper as if it were his file. The third story is a documentary film showing
an open-heart operation on a four-year-old boy with all its graphic detail.
The narrating and showing of these stories are interspersed with and interrupted
by a recording of Yu Jian's poem, which is divided into three "chapters":
history of birth, history of growth, history of love. The poem and the play
together document different stages of a person's life with his "file"
following him wherever he is. In a society where the Big Brother watches over
everybody, people's lives are open files.
Although the stories
in Zero File are real life stories, the play also functions on a symbolic and
allegorical level. In the final scene, box after box of green apples and red
tomatoes were thrown into a huge industrial fan, which crushed them and sprayed
juice and bits and pieces of fruits in the air. Was this scene of mass destruction
supposed to represent the suppression of the student demonstration in Tiananmen
Square? An interviewer asked Mou Sen, who cautioned against any political interpretation
of his play. He said, "As a director, my starting point is never political,
never naively ideological, but always artistic--to reveal the basic condition
of human existence" (Salter, 1996, 226).
Besides the industrial
fan, the stage, which resembles an ugly industrial factory, is littered with
all kinds of mechanical gadgets: steel rods and plates, metal-cutting machine
and welding equipment, a metal work table with vises mounted on either end,
an old tape recorder, loudspeakers, a film projector, etc. Throughout the performance,
an actor welds the metal rods unto a metal frame in the background, sending
sparks fly and making a loud noise. This preponderance of machines seems to
suggest that the modern man is not only controlled by a repressive government
but also by technologies of his own invention. With his unique blend of documentary
realism and symbolic stage images, Mou Sen has created a disturbing but also
thought-provoking view of the basic condition of human existence.
Conclusions < back
to top >
The post-Mao period represents the second period of Westernization in Chinese drama. The first period was during the May Fourth New Culture Movement of the 1920s when Western-style spoken drama was introduced into China. Reform-minded Chinese intellectuals adopted this new drama as a means to promote social and political reform. Contemporary Chinese dramatists, while continuing the May Fourth tradition of social criticism, seek to overcome the limits of realist drama of the past and break loose from the political straight jacket that came with realism and socialist realism.
The 1980s was a very active
period for drama with a large number of experimental works produced. Gao Xingjian's
Bus Stop, a Chinese version of Waiting for Godot, and Wang Peigong's modernist
play WM led the way in the emergence of a new kind of Chinese spoken drama which
combines modernistic techniques and the conventions of traditional Chinese musical
drama. Unlike their May Fourth predecessors, who regarded traditional Chinese
opera as an outdated cultural relic, dramatists of the post-Mao era try to bring
the Chinese theatrical tradition and Western modernism closer together. Some
writers of traditional opera, Wei Minglun for example, also favor this fusion
approach. His new Sichuan opera Pan Jinlian is a transnational and trans-cultural
study of the condition of women.
The number of experimental
plays decreased in the 1990s, partly due to a more repressive atmosphere after
the Tiananmen Incident of 1989, but the spirit of experimentation is kept alive
by another generation of dramatists. Mou Sen's independent theater company,
Garage Theater, has produced some of the most avant-garde plays in China. His
play File Zero is an exploration of an Orwellian world where people's identities
are determined by the classified files that government keeps on them. This play
has toured Europe and Canada, but has yet to be shown to its home audience.
The Post-Mao economic
reform has also produced a profound impact on Chinese drama. Theater companies
can no longer depend on state support, and the captive audience of the past
has also disappeared. To survive and prosper, these companies must seek corporate
sponsorship and produce plays that are entertaining to attract audience. The
newly emergent mini drama with its humorous satire on current events and problems
is very propular with the masses. The trend toward entertainment and commercialism
does pose a threat to drama as profit instincts drive down artistic standards.
But there is a positive side to the loss of state funding. It allows for independent
theater companies, such as Mou Sen's Garage Theater, to emerge. If Chinese dramatists
can weather the current economic storm and remain true to their artistic pursuit,
the potential for creative growth is great.
Bibliography < back
to top >
ESSLIN, Martin (1969). The Theater of the Absurd. New York: Anchor Books.
GAO, Xingjian (1985). Gao Xingjian xiju ji (Collected Dramatic Works of Gao Xingjian). Beijing: Qunzhong chubanshe.
MOU, Sen (1996). File 0: A Theatre Poem. Trans. by Cheung Fai. In Theatre Forum. No. Winter-Spring, pp. 11-21.
SALTER, Denis (1996). "China's Theatre of Dissent: A Conversation with Mou Sen and Wu Wenguang," Asian Theatre Journal. Vol 13, No. 2, pp. 218-228.
SHANGHAI WENYI CHUBANSHE, ed. (1986) Tanso xiju ji (Experimental Drama). Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe.
SHANK, Theodore (1996). "An Interview With the Artistic Director of Xiju Chejian," Theatre Forum. No. Winter-Spring, pp. 7-10.
TUNG, Constantine and MACKERRAS, Colin, eds. (1987). Drama in the People's Republic of China. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press.
WEI, Minglun (1989). Kuyin cheng xi (Hard Work Turns Into Plays). Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe.
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YU, Shiao-ling (1996). Chinese Drama After the Cultural Revolution, 1979-1989. Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press.
YUE, Meiqin (1990). Liushou Nushi (The Lady Who Stays Behind). In Shanghai xiju Shanghai Drama). No. 6, pp. 41-56.
Shiao-ling Yu
Oregon State University