Published in China News Weekly, Issue 1014 on September 27, 2021
In 1956, the Capital Theater of the Beijing People's Art Theater was completed, and the premiere of the play chose Cao Yu's "Sunrise". In September this year, the newly built Cao Yu Theater of Beijing Renyi was put into use, and the premiere of the play was still set for "Sunrise". This is the fifth version of "Sunrise" rehearsed by Renyi, directed by Feng Yuanzheng, vice president of Renyi.
Behind the Capital Theatre in the center of Beijing, the off-white, slightly low-key Beijing International Theater Center was recently built, pinning on the international vision of this veteran "drama factory". The Drama Center contains two theaters, "Cao Yu Theater" and "Beijing Renyi Small Theater", with 700 seats and 200 seats each. Cao Yu was the first president of the Renyi Jianyuan Academy, and it is obvious that the "Cao Yu Theater" named after him will play an important role in Beijing Renyi.
On September 2, the Beijing International Drama Center was officially opened, and on the same night, the new rehearsal "Sunrise" premiered at the Cao Yu Theater, and then performed 7 times in a row. "This play is not only one of Mr. Cao Yu's most important works, but also very meaningful to Renyi." Feng Yuanzheng told China News Weekly.
"Sunrise" stills: Lu Lu plays Chen Bailu. Photo by Li Chunguang
"Sunrise" is a story set in the 1930s, and the main theme is the oppression of people in the old society. Feng Yuanzheng said that today's re-arrangement of "Sunrise" cannot simply reproduce the classics, as a creator, we must consider what ideas we want to convey, and we must have an inner dialogue with people now.
"The theater of renyi is an innovative theater, there are traditional versions of Sunrise, there are modern versions of Sunrise, and there may be second and third versions in the future." Feng Yuanzheng said. After that, Cao Yu Theater will also launch a new row of "Thunderstorm" directed by Pu Cunxin and Tang Ye, and "Wilderness" directed by young director Yan Rui. The classic new row, "New Blood" debuted, opening for the "Cao Yu Theater".
Pulled out of the 30s
Feng Yuanzheng is no stranger to "Sunrise", in the 2000 ren ming director's ren art version of "Sunrise", he played Fang Dasheng, and also directed two versions of "Sunrise" outside of renyi. However, this time for the artist director's new row of "Sunrise", it has a special significance for him.
"Sunrise" was published in 1936 and is set in Tianjin before the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. Fang Dasheng, a young man from other provinces, came to the city to look for his first love, Zhu Jun, and found that she had become a socialite Chen Bailu and was supported by the banker Pan Yueting. Fang Dasheng's arrival awakened Chen Bailu's soul, and at this time, the ensuing changes continued to torment her heart. The girl she sympathized with, "Little Things", was sold to a brothel by the gangster forces and died of humiliation, and Pan Yueting was secretly bankrupted, and the debts that could not be repaid were placed in front of her. At sunrise, Chen Bailu swallowed a large number of sleeping pills and died in despair, and Fang Dasheng ignited his fighting spirit.
Feng Yuanzheng originally hoped to make a large-scale adaptation of the original work, but there was not enough time, and it was the directing actors who occupied his energy more than the adapted script. He chose almost all the new actors, a group of "post-95" actors appeared, Chen Bailu's actor Lu Lu was born in 1997. Under the struggle of Feng Yuanzheng, a month of rehearsal time was added. They rehearsed in the form of classes, rehearsing plays every afternoon for three months, and at noon and in the evening, he also specially "added lessons" for actors, starting from basic classes such as sound, stage, shape, and table.
"If you give me two more months to write a script, you may see the sunrise that is least like "Sunrise", but it may also be the "Sunrise" that most reflects Mr. Cao Yu's original intentions." Feng told China News Weekly that he had hoped to dismantle the plot of Sunrise and reorganize the story. A bold idea was to pull Fang Out of the story and wander outside the story. This idea is not fully realized, and is only partially embodied in the opening.
Stills from Sunrise.
At the beginning, under the chasing light, Yang Mingxin, who plays Fang Dasheng, takes a U-shaped trajectory on the stage. Each direction represents an emotion, from the overwhelm of the new city, to the disgust in the face of strangeness, the pity after seeing the "little things", and finally the determination of the struggle. This opening is different from any previous version, it is a condensation of the whole play, but also a switch of angles, Fang Dasheng transformed into an observer of a deformed society. As a result, the whole play not only tells the story of Chen Bailu's destruction, but also Fang Dasheng's reflection, resulting in a double perspective.
Feng Yuanzheng wanted to blur the background of time, so he did not deliberately restore the environment of the 1930s. In fact, Cao Yu also said that the time setting of his play is not specific, but only delineates a rough era. "If you restore the hotels and costumes of the old era, the current audience is only objectively watching a story." Feng Yuanzheng said, "Blurring these is to hope that the audience will often withdraw and look at themselves." ”
Feng Yuanzheng explained that there are many possibilities for drama, and there are Hamlets wearing suits and jeans abroad. But many Chinese audiences see the curtain open, if Chen Bailu is wearing jeans and a white shirt, they will wonder, is this "Sunrise"? The audience's habit of watching the play "with ideas rather than hearts" will affect the acceptance of new interpretation angles, and he hopes to break this concept.
In terms of stage design, this version also has a more bold innovation, the style is simple and modern, using multimedia technologies such as projection and even live broadcasting. In the second act, a goldfish is projected in the background, and the whole play is swimming in the water, implying that except for Fang Dasheng, the people on the stage are all fish in the fish tank, and no one can swim out. The scene where Chen Bailu committed suicide even projected the actor's expression onto the background wall.
"Personally, I think this version of Sunrise is just a small step, not a big step yet." Feng Yuanzheng believes that this version of the innovation step is not big enough. Beijing Renyi has had subversive adaptations such as Ren Ming's version of "Sunrise" and Li Liuyi's version of "Wilderness", and when these two plays were staged in 2000, they triggered a great discussion in the theater industry, and critics bluntly said that the new version "changed" the beauty of the original work and "revolutionized" it. Feng Yuanzheng believes that Beijing Renyi has the gene of innovation, and has not rejected the pioneering method, provided that the fundamental of "creating characters" is maintained, and characters cannot become symbols.
Different interpretations of Chen Bailu's death
In this rehearsal, Feng Yuanzheng "picked up" several scenes that had been deleted.
Cao Yu's script is always too long, "Sunrise" is 80,000 words long, and the whole performance takes at least five or six hours. Cao Yu also confessed: "I write scripts, which have always been lengthy, and every time I perform, I must make abridged works." "The deletions in each new layout also create major differences between the different versions.
At the end of Cao Yu's original script, after Chen Bailu committed suicide by taking sleeping pills, Fang Dasheng came on the scene, hoping to persuade her to leave here with herself. Without a response, he left alone and walked out in the sunlight. Most of the previous performance versions have cut this paragraph and ended with the death of Chen Bailu. Feng Yuanzheng "picked up" this scene. Diao Guangqin, the director of the 1981 renyi version of "Sunrise", once explained that Fang Dasheng did not have to come back to make the final rescue because he had already understood that there was nothing he could do. Feng Yuanzheng believes that this is a scene of deduction, reflecting the original meaning of Cao Yu's name "Sunrise".
The whole "Sunrise" is to explain how Chen Bailu went step by step to destruction. However, what is the underlying reason for stripping away the cloak of external events, there is a wealth of room for interpretation, which also leads to differences between different versions.
The performance version at the beginning of the founding of New China portrayed Chen Bailu as a self-depraved, unreflective woman. This was influenced by the mainstream trend of class analysis at that time, believing that Chen Bailu's tragedy stemmed from the decadent and weak outlook on life of petty-bourgeois intellectuals. Pan Yueting went bankrupt, Zhang George refused to borrow money, the bill became a curse of death, and economic reasons eventually pushed her to a desperate situation. And she has no resistance to society, does not deserve sympathy, is a golden bird that rests in a cage without realizing it, not an eagle with broken wings.
"If Chen Bailu is really this kind of woman, then it will become meaningless to perform her experience today." In 1957, Shanghai critic Chen Gongmin criticized sunrise, which was performed at the time. He believes that the creator is too obsessed with the "drama" of external events and has a shallow understanding of the inner world and the essence of tragedy. In fact, Chen Bailu had already woken up from mental paralysis and experienced a huge inner storm. If you want to fly, you can't fly, it's impossible to live, "you don't want to die and you have to die", this is the real tragedy.
After the reform and opening up, the theater research community "corrected the chaos", believing that the more important reason for Chen Bailu's desperate suicide was the insoluble spiritual crisis in his heart. The 1981 Renyi edition of Sunrise follows this interpretation and is well recognized by Cao Yu.
After the new century, there was a new interpretation of "Sunrise". One of the most subversive adaptations in the history of "Sunrise" was a 2000 version directed by Ren Ming of Beijing Renyi. That adaptation set the backdrop of the era in the contemporary era, set in a five-star hotel, with actors wearing suits and evening dresses, and the opening scene is a dance in the disco. Li Shiqing, played by Wu Gang, took out a laptop that was still very fashionable at the time to explain the stock market for Pan Yueting.
Ren Ming said at the time that this reinterpretation of "Sunrise" was so that people would no longer appreciate the classics like patronizing antique shops, but would go to the plot immersively and resonate. That rehearsal placed more emphasis on explaining from the perspective of commodity economy, showing the relationship between people in commodity society. The bold adaptation was greatly controversial, and ten years later, Ren Ming re-directed "Sunrise" and returned to the classic style.
Huang Ying, a doctor at the College of Literature of Beijing Normal University, once explained that in stage performances, due to external conflicts such as bankruptcy, borrowing money, and debt collection, the characters are relatively difficult to perform, so from the perspective of the effect of the performance, it is easy for the audience to interpret Chen Bailu's suicide as mainly related to money.
It is worth mentioning that in order to solve this problem and show the spiritual reasons for Chen Bailu's death, the 2008 General Political Drama Version of "Sunrise" created a new role: "Chen Bailu's Soul". Let the "soul of Chen Bailu" speak and tell its spiritual world. In the script, the lines of "soul" were originally stage prompts written by Cao Yu, these highly literary stage prompts are very important, but it is difficult to be directly said, "Chen Bailu's soul" has explored a more straightforward solution.
Lu Lu, played by Chen Bailu, told China News Weekly that digging into Chen Bailu's heart and explaining why she went to death step by step is still the most important lesson. "The stimulation of a series of events woke up the deepest pain in her heart little by little, and every stitch was pierced in the heart." She analyzed that by the time Pan Yueting went bankrupt, Chen Bailu's heart had been drained, and there was no future and no way back to the past, like a trapped beast. At this time, the bankruptcy left her completely helpless.
Re-performing "Sunrise" today, Feng Yuanzheng hopes that the audience will have a more empathetic understanding of Chen Bailu's plight. "Don't look at class, but want everyone to think about what it would be like if I encountered these things in real life?"
"New Blood" came to power
The success or failure of "Sunrise" is largely related to Chen Bailu. However, Gu Wei, director of Beijing Renyi, once said in an interview that for a long time, including Beijing Renyi, the national drama troupe lacked actors to play Chen Bailu, and there was no such big green coat.
In 2019, Lu Lu graduated from the Musical Theater Department of the Central Academy of Drama and entered the human arts. Feng Yuanzheng admitted that when he recruited her, he thought that she was suitable for playing Chen Bailu in the future, "appearance and temperament are taking this road."
In the preparatory stage, Feng Yuanzheng took Lu Lu and this group of young actors to watch several old movies, including "A River of Spring Water Flows East", "Crows and Sparrows", etc., and the film's portrayal of women and the life of the bottom has similarities with "Sunrise". However, if he wanted to understand Chen Bailu's situation at that time, he knew that it was impossible for an actor in his twenties to understand Chen Bailu's situation at that time. His approach is not only to let the actors experience the role, but also to dig into their own hearts.
Near the end, Chen Bailu recounted her experience of being married and having children. Feng Yuanzheng felt that this was Chen Bailu's memories of the good past at the end of his life, and he should not cry bitterly, but he must carry the bitterness. Lu Lu could not find a state at first, Feng Yuanzheng inspired her to recall the sweetness and pain of her love process, she burst into tears, squatted in the corner after stepping down from the stage and continued to cry. After crying for a few days, she asked Feng Yuanzheng: "Do you have to do this every time you perform?" Feng Yuanzheng said: "Now we have to put these things away, put the pain in our hearts, start imagining beauty, and then say lines, it is different." ”
For Lu Lu, the biggest challenge is how to make herself accept Chen Bailu's mental journey to despair. "Times are also different, for example, today's women are less attached to men and have more choices." Lu Lu said, but at that time, Chen Bailu was completely not in such a way of thinking and situation, "The actor must accept this." ”
In order to highlight the cleanliness and purity of Fang Dasheng, Yang Mingxin, who plays Fang Dasheng, originally hoped to act more youthfully, but often overexerted during rehearsals, and later gradually debugged nature. He told China News Weekly that the end of Sunrise was the beginning of Fang Dasheng's new life, "What is specific to him, he may not know, but he will continue to look for it." Li Yue, who plays Zhang George, designed his own tone for Zhang George, a clumsy disciple who stayed in The Yang, interspersed his lines with non-standard English, and showed his oily cunning by raising the tone.
This version of "Sunrise" also means that a group of young actors have come to the foreground. Feng Yuanzheng took up the position of captain of the renyi actor team in 2017, attaching great importance to the cultivation of new actors, and in the past few years, he personally took charge of it and recruited a student class, and 10 of the 15 actors signed the artist. In recent years, the renyi actor team has replenished more than twenty "new blood".
Beijing Renyi once experienced a period of lack of success, that is, at the end of the last century, when the older generation of actors collectively retired and Feng Yuanzheng was a group of actors who starred. Because the old version of the classic ZhuYu was in front, when the new team of "TeaHouse" took the stage, it was met with a lot of scolding. In recent years, renyi has faced a new and old alternation, and he hopes that young actors will not experience the dilemma of that time and achieve gentle alternation in a few years. "Don't let us bow and leave it alone, we hope to help them when we can still act." Feng Yuanzheng told China News Weekly.