![]() The manuscript was signed with characters Ying recognized immediately. Then last year, an acquaintance texted Ying: a handwritten Chinese translation of A Raisin in the Sun had turned up at auction in Shanghai, recovered from discarded papers at a Beijing antiques market. In the ensuing chaos, Wu's publisher soon lost her manuscript. ![]() Intellectuals, such as Ying's parents, and civil society members in particular were the targets of a vicious purge and repeated public humiliation. But soon after, a decade of political turmoil and factional violence called the Cultural Revolution began.Ĭultural production ground to a halt. Ying Da's mother, the translator Wu Shiliang, loved the play and unbeknownst to Ying, finished a translation of the script in 1963. On opening night earlier this month, the theater was only half-full, a result of local regulation mandating theater-goers sit one seat apart from each other, fully masked.īeijing's production of A Raisin in the Sun begins with a lost script. ![]() Ying had planned to stage the play for early this year, but a coronavirus outbreak hit just weeks after they began rehearsal and pushing the opening night to September. This is probably a terrible thing to say to Americans." "No!" he exclaims several times, when I ask him about whether the current global discourse about anti-Black racism led him to choose this moment in particular to stage A Raisin in the Sun. Ying Da is insistent his production's timing has nothing to do with such issues, or with the Black Lives Matter movement or the fury following the killing of George Floyd. It has systematically curbed expressions of ethnic identity among Tibetans and historically Muslim ethnic groups and has extralegally detained at least hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, a Turkish ethnic group in China's western region of Xinjiang. But the Chinese cast - accustomed to using stage make-up to get into character - was at first bewildered when Miller scrapped the wigs.Ĭhina, too, has an ugly record with tolerating diversity in complexion and belief. He felt the "realistic stage make-up" favored by Chinese theaters was an ungainly visual shortcut that could alienate audiences. To play the Loman family from Brooklyn in that play, the Chinese actors planned to don blonde wigs and powder on make-up to adjust their complexion. In 1983, Ying's father, actor and director Ying Ruocheng, helped playwright Arthur Miller to stage his play Death of a Salesman in Beijing. In the past, these different theatrical practices have led to a culture clash. ![]() "The aesthetic practice itself is slightly different because the goal for this realistic makeup in China is to as closely simulate verisimilitude and as an authentic kind of representation of a foreigner as possible, even though this is not possible," says Claire Conceison, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an expert on contemporary Chinese theater. Unlike minstrelsy or blackface in the United States, this make up was done as a sign of empathy and realism. Later, Chinese theaters would add chin or nose prosthetics to actors playing foreigners. The first documented Chinese-language production of a foreign play was in 1907 of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the actors in midnight black face paint and curly wigs. ![]()
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