On April 24th, the first public welfare cultural academic activity with the theme of "Youth 'Sunset', Drama Is Not Old" was held at the Tiantongyuan Culture and Arts Center to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Chinese contemporary small theater drama. For the first time, the famous performance artist Li Moran's only small theater drama "Xizhao" performance video was publicly screened, and Li Moran's son Li Longyin and grandson Li Ji were invited as guests, reviewing Li Moran's dramatic life and talking about the three generations of Li Moran's grandchildren' dramatic complex.
In 1993, the "China Small Theater Theater Exhibition and International Academic Symposium" was held in Beijing, and 15 small theater plays were staged one after another. Among them, Liaoning Renyi's "Xizhao" has attracted much attention and is unprecedentedly popular. At that time, the enthusiastic audience squeezed out the door of the Qingyi Small Theater. Shi Weijian, then director of the China Youth Art Theatre, had to call the Donghuamen police station and ask the police to maintain order. Cai Ming, an actor who was already very famous at the time, said: "I climbed in from the window of the women's toilet of the Qingyi Small Theater and watched it under the light shelf. If I hadn't watched this play, I would have regretted it for the rest of my life. ”
The play is the first and only small theater drama in the brilliant life of the famous performance artist Li Moran, and it is also his farewell to the stage. The president of the International Shakespeare Society called "China's living Lear" in "Xizhao" a serious and solemn positive image, creating a selfish, narrow, possessive, withdrawn and eccentric old painter. Before the performance of "Xizhao", Li Moran had not been on the stage for seven years. In the early 1990s, it was the trough of Chinese drama, and the purpose of his re-appearance in small theater dramas was "to earn the audience back, and at the same time, through performances, words and deeds, cultivate more students, and find a way out for the revitalization of drama." ”
"I used to think that my grandfather had some theatrical concepts that were wrong, but now I understand that it is not that he is wrong, but because I don't understand." At the scene of the event, Li Moran's grandson, Li Moran, who graduated from the Directing Department of the Central Academy of Drama and is now the director of the Drama Research Institute of the China Academy of Arts, recalled the arguments he had with his grandfather in those years, and he was full of emotions.
Li Longyin, the son of Li Moran, also recalled that when he showed his father his first script "Ma Jun on Righteousness", he was questioned by Li Moran: "Do you think this thing you wrote is called a drama?" Later, the play was officially staged, Li Longyin starred, and Li Moran deliberately rushed from Liaoning to Beijing to watch the play, but Li Longyin was afraid of his father, so he let the B group actors perform on stage. Li Longyin still remembers his father's lost expression at that time, but this play was finally recognized by Li Moran, which also made Li Longyin later resist not saying the same words as his father when he saw his son Li Jiao first take out the script "Cao Cao", but supported and encouraged his son. "Because I was under pressure from my father, I must not suppress my son. Although I don't think a lot of things he's doing are the same, I don't think it's right, but maybe I don't understand. "The exploration of art and the sincere and deep emotions between the three generations made the audience moved.