Show and tell
For 63-year-old Shan Wancheng, who has worked for a State-owned enterprise for four decades and is going to retire in less than two years, making his debut onstage at the sixth Wuzhen Theater Festival on October 18 was one of his best days.
Performing in Chinese director Li Jianjun’s latest play, Popular
Mechanics, which premiered as one of the four opening plays, Shan shared his story of being a singer in a choir as a child and a lover of the arts as an adult, ending up his monologue by saying that “I have never been away from theater and it was the fulfillment of a lifetime ambition to start acting professionally”.
Besides Shan, 17 amateur actors played in Li’s Popular Mechanics, including a young female nurse in her early 20s, a welder, who dropped out of school and works in Beijing, and a 6-year-old boy, who loves watching movies. Like Shan, they all love acting and shared their stories with the audience.
The play was staged for four nights during the sixth Wuzhen Theater Festival, attracting an audience of over 1,200. On Dec 8 and 9,
Popular Mechanics will be staged for the first time in Beijing’s InsideOut Theater.
“I kept asking myself questions like ‘what is acting?’ ‘what is theater?’ ‘what is the connection between ordinary people and theater?’ I found it was hard for me to answer those questions so I let those amateur actors talk about themselves and their understanding of theater,” says director Li, who moved from his hometown Lanzhou, Gansu province, to Beijing to study at the Central Academy of Drama, obtaining his bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in stage set design in 1999 and 2005.
To select actors for the play, Li spent three months interviewing people, who joined his theater work- shops held in Beijing and Shanghai, this summer.
“The more people I talked to, the more I realized that I should leave behind the approaches to acting and the rules about theater, which I learned at school,” says Li. “Those amateur actors are powerful in their performances, and they deserve the applause.”
Li interviewed about 100 people, choosing 17 for the play, of different ages, occupations and diversified stories of their associations with the theater. To fully display the relationship between theater and the ordinary people, Li also screened some of the conversations he had with the interviewees, who couldn’t make it onstage, including a Beijing-based taxi driver, who, during his conversation with Li, read the script of the famous Chinese play, Teahouse, based on the original play by novelist and playwright Lao She (1899-1966).
“What impressed me is not their ability to act but their commitment onstage. The performances were staged outdoors and it was cold. But the actors performed well. Each of them invented their own scenery. They dressed up for the show, although they had to wear raincoats during the last day’s performance,” recalls Li. “Some of the audiences were confused about the play while the others related to it. I was standing at the back observing the audience’s reaction.”
The director also notes that the title of the play, Popular Mechanics, was borrowed from American writer Raymond Carver’s short story with the same title.
“When I read the short story, there are different themes in it, like conflict, struggle and communication, which I felt related to the play I was working on,” he adds.
In his 40s, Li made his directorial debut in 2007 and directs about one original play a year. It was not the first time that the director has worked with amateur actors. In 2011, he directed a play, entitled A Madman’s
Diary, adapted from Lu Xun’s first major short story that had the same title. His actors were 20 university students from Beijing. The play was well received critically and it was staged in other Chinese cities, including Hangzhou and Shanghai. The same year, Li founded his own theater troupe, New Youth Theater, which offers workshops for amateur actors.
In 2013, he brought 19 ordinary young Chinese people, who left their hometowns to work in bigger cities, to share their stories about the cities where they grew up and the cities where they work and live now.
The director also notes that the title of the play, Popular Mechanics, was borrowed from American writer Raymond Carver’s short story with the same title.