Taiwan Performance Workshop's Drama "Red Sky"
◎An Ying
In 2020, the theater has been welcoming guests for more than half a year under the epidemic, and the Beijing International Youth Theater Festival has arrived in September, which is undoubtedly good news for the deserted theater, hungry audiences and eager creators. According to the information released by the theater festival, the number of registered plays this year has reached a new high since the festival was held. Creators who are sheltered from the epidemic at home can concentrate on creating in order to wait for opportunities. Buying tickets to watch the play, one is to support offline viewing, and the other is out of a simple idea: in this difficult environment, I want to know what everyone is doing.
Gu Lei's new work "Water Flowing Down" participating in the Youth Opera Festival this time involves the topic of off-site support. Our generation of Chinese dramatists, who are similar to his age, are entering middle age no matter how hard they are "forever young". At the same time, the waves roll in after the rivers and lakes, and our students are active on the stage of the recent Youth Opera Festival, collagen and ambition shine all over their faces, and the Green Opera Festival is their big event of the year.
Although this drama criticism only talks about the gains and losses of Gu Lei's play, it may also reflect the yesterday and present that our generation of dramatists should face at this moment.
Maybe the creator doesn't know his protagonist
At the beginning of the play, we see a father-son conflict. His father accidentally injured the female doctor in a hospital accident, so his son, who was working as a doctor in Beijing and was in a difficult period of entrepreneurship, was called back to his hometown in Hebei. The two were fighting each other, and during this time, the son was told by the doctor that his father had small cell carcinoma and had three months to live. The son wanted to hide it, but finally blurted out the truth about the disease in the escalation of the quarrel with his father.
At the beginning of the plot, in view of the background of the epidemic in 2020 and the medical hot spots such as the injury of Dr. Tao Yong, I had the expectation of medical treatment to social issues. However, the work does not go deeper, and the conflict between the people in the play spreads trivially in the personality and resentment of the two generations of men, and the contradiction gradually focuses on the son's older unmarried status.
I have to say that this is really a clichéd topic, but fortunately it can resonate with the audience. The audience group of the Youth Opera Festival, the proportion of students, workplace newcomers is very high, 18-25 years old is also the main audience of drama performances, only in the big city to pursue the future of these young people, it is easy to feel empathy for the "marriage urging" this may also be suffering from the family relationship pain point, you can imagine that they will naturally empathize with their sons. In fact, in the first act of the father-son conflict, the person who is really disrupted by the sudden event, and who is faced with choices and actions, is indeed the son, the person who learns of his father's illness and faces to say or not to say, compared with the father is more like his troublemaker, part of the situation.
However, as the truth is solved, the plot progresses to the second act, the old father in the hospital room recalls the joy of getting along with his son when he was young, and we suddenly realize that the son is not the protagonist, the father is. This caused a great sense of surprise in the viewing. Of course, it is not that the elderly cannot be used as the protagonist, but the audience's psychological path of acceptance is worthy of recognition and attention, which is what every creator who sincerely wants to communicate with the audience through the work needs to consider, especially for mature creators with a lot of creative experience. If you really choose the character who is relatively difficult to trigger empathy as the protagonist, you should establish his identity at the beginning of the play, and close his relationship with the audience through character shaping.
Robert McKee says that "'empathy' is 'like me'"; the law of screenwriting tells us that the protagonist should be the one who causes the most empathy among all the characters, so as to ensure that the audience's attention is steadily focused on the main narrative line, which I am very convinced. Because of this, the viewing experience of the protagonist who "stands wrong" in the complete first act of "Water Flowing Down" is inevitably played because of the surprise. Just when this mistake was in the air, the passage of recalling the good old life crossed. In hindsight, this was actually the more moving part of the whole show. In the father's imagination, the current son transforms into a young self, bathing and frolicking for the childhood son. This not only reverses the bad feeling of character relationship caused by the previous conflict, but also relates to the author's intergenerational inheritance expression, if the audience can identify the father's protagonist from the beginning.
So, why is there such a misplaced problem? From the age and experience background of the creator, it can be inferred that he entered this dramatic situation from the perspective of "son". However, when creating the play, he chose to stand on his "opposite side" and write the story with his father as the protagonist. However, in the creation, he consciously or unconsciously paid more attention to his son who was more familiar with himself, which led to the imbalance in the proportion of the protagonist setting and the character shaping.
The father imagined an absurd plan to imprison his son in a narrow passage behind a large closet to be imprisoned for medical treatment. For this scene, the director "brought in" a pompous nurse and a dog played by a living person, who illustrated his father's imagination with comic-like movements. In view of the acquaintance with the choreographer Gu Lei for many years and the reading of many of his works, I will think that the "Pavlov Project" paragraph is a chapter of the "most Gu Lei" of this play, and the most consistent style and interest of his. However, the style of this play also exposes his sense of separation from his father. Because of the diaphragm, they cannot understand their obsession and logic, and they are incompetent and incapable of expressing the actions of the characters with relatively real brushstrokes, so it is better to make them absurd, especially from the perspective of the "son", many of the actions of the fathers are originally absurd.
The creators don't know his protagonist, which is the crux of the misalignment of "Water Flowing Down". If you choose your son as the protagonist, the narrative and expression should be much smoother. There is also a possibility that the creator may not care much about the protagonist's problem, perhaps the son and father are double male protagonists, and the audience can also accept this setting, but until the stage due to the misalignment of the protagonist and empathy caused by the viewing and expression of obstacles, we have to say that as far as this play is concerned, the double male protagonist is not feasible.
Drama does not develop and does not move people
Let's go back to the first scene of "Water Flows Down", or the father-son conflict, under the clichéd topic of forced marriage, showing a father and son who have a rather bad relationship. The decibels of their dialogue with each other and the sharpness of their words have been hanging on the high point, which makes people naturally guess that there has been an insurmountable past between the two. However, as the play progressed, especially after the "good old memories", the speculation was frustrated. It turned out that this was a father and son who had once been intimate, so ordinary, and nothing bad had happened. The father-son relationship is so bad that it is difficult to explain convincingly with simple personality discord and forced marriage contradictions. If the son has such a bad attitude toward the father because of this alone, the judgment of "filial piety" will follow. This is really detrimental to the characters and further damages the expression and communication of the work.
In contrast to the lack of excavation of past events, the plot progress in the play is weak. It was not until the second scene that the father's goal of curing his son's marital disorder through the "Pavlov effect" was established. The son, on the other hand, is passive throughout the play, not knowing what he wants, but dealing with various situations.
"Water Flows Down" reminds me of the Taiwanese performance workshop's play "Red Sky", which features a simple incident sketch of a son visiting his parents in a nursing home. The story takes place in a shabby nursing home burrow, Jin Shijie played the son of a forty-year-old who went to the mainland to do business and lost money, and came to visit his parents for the first time, in fact, he wanted to borrow the only remaining pension insurance principal of his parents to invest in business. This goal makes the son's actions clear and recognizable, the play is moving forward, and the audience has always expected it. A few minutes of sketches unearthed the atmosphere of violence that the family of three had harbored for decades because of the sense of failure. At the end of the play, the audience who originally judged that their son was not filial piety was no longer one-sided accusations, but pondered the source of this family tragedy.
With no history to excavate, and no goal to pursue at this moment, the fierce language action on the stage of "Water Flowing Down" is presented as a simple quarrel of words and rushes. The action lacks a level that can be extended, although it presents social topics such as medical troubles, entrepreneurial crises, and middle-aged anxiety, and there are also terminal illness time limits that reinforce the dramatic situation, which is scattered with many details of life texture such as the shortness of childhood troubles, but the "drama" is still static.
Can still drama be moving? The answer is yes, but the premise is that everything on stage can be immersive. Objectively speaking, the intention of "the child wants to be raised and does not wait" can resonate with the audience in general, especially in the special year of "2020". The details scattered in "Water FlowIng Down" are not lacking in intimate textures, which also shows that the creators have used their own life accumulation. This is an experienced author.
The French leftist theater master Munushkin and his Cirque du Soleil have a play called "Ephemera", and the first fragment is also a sketch about life and death. The middle-aged daughter had just hung up a notice sign for the sale of her mother's house with a flower garden due to the death of her mother, and a father who had a new daughter knocked on the door to see the house and immediately decided to buy it. The middle-aged daughter listened to the noisy phone call of the intruder and remembered her mother who was playing with flowers and plants in the garden... Except for the accidental intersection of life and death, there is no drama in the actions of the characters, the exchange of judgments and plots, and it must be admitted that this is also a "static" scene. However, in a sense, we can feel that the members of Cirque du Soleil want to present such a still moment, because there is emotional resonance, and the synergy and confidence of all the members of the troupe. The actor's full life flow of performance state, with the details of the scene with the force of the heart, starting from the first "creak" of the iron door, that is, the audience is pulled into the life of the people in the play. Cirque du Soleil is confident in their ability to create the illusion of life that allows every audience, directly, indirectly or even without bereavement, to be immersed in this authenticity.
Unfortunately, on the Chinese theatrical stage, such hallucinations are extremely rare. The performance of "Water Down" is not real enough: the stage cavity distances the audience from the situation; the son's action of pulling on the large wardrobe cannot establish a real sense of space, thus making the father's original absurd plan even more puzzling.
The generation outside the system has reached an age when it is no longer tolerated
Although there are many deficiencies in the beak, it must be pointed out that "Water Flows Down" is still a sincere work. It is the creator's heart based on age experience that makes me realize that the young people of our generation are fading and maturing on the line of no return in the course of life.
Gu Lei is one of the representatives of our generation of dramatists. In 2001, he rehearsed Vojcek's "Vojcek" by Beijing Institute of Technology's Cirque du Soleil, which became one of the iconic works that brought the "opposition" creative force of campus drama into the mainstream vision. From this point of view, he created "Farewell to the Long Night without Restraints", "The Night of Ten People", "Can't Take Care of it", "Life Discomfort", etc. in nearly 20 years, from the campus drama club to the establishment of the Tree New Wind Theater Troupe, he did not pursue a degree in drama, and has always adhered to his own theater path as an amateur. This is very representative of the creation and survival status of a generation of Chinese dramatists.
Unlike our predecessors, when we spent our adolescence in the 1990s, when Chinese theater was at its lowest, many of us had the opportunity to get exposed to drama during college and began to create our own drama creations. Active creators on the platform of the Youth Opera Festival account for a considerable proportion of halfway monks. Correspondingly, even after the follow-up professional study and academic support, most of them did not enter the state-owned drama theater troupe like their predecessors, but stepped on the monsoon of the era of professional enrollment expansion of art colleges and universities to enter the teaching position, and drama creation became an amateur career outside their own work.
The openness of the times provides a variety of choices, a generation of dramatists who have set up another door outside the theater group system have chosen the freedom of individual creation, and have given up the protection and push mechanism within the system, in the early part of this century, when the commercial drama environment has not yet taken shape, from the college student drama festival to the youth drama festival to the later Beijing International Youth Theater Festival, it was once the only channel for The Chinese generation of dramatists to show up. At that time, the new talents created and grew at the rhythm of one drama a year, accumulating works and experiences at the same time, but also accumulating their own audience.
Looking back more than ten years later, this generation of dramatists has been tolerated too much, and they have accidentally reached an age when they can no longer be tolerated. At a time when they are about to enter the threshold of middle age, some people choose to return to the system and join the state-owned academy. Official support projects represented by the National Endowment for the Arts have also gradually radiated to this group of "opposition" creators. The acceleration of the urbanization process has enabled folk dramas to operate in the form of studios and companies, and the environment has changed significantly compared with more than a decade ago. However, what has this generation of dramatists who have gone through their own unique theater roads brought to Chinese drama? What can be left behind? At the moment when you are gradually entering middle age and should enter the mature period of creation, do you have the courage to face up to your own shortcomings?
At the end of the play "Water Flows Down", the son who bid farewell to his father recounted that he had ushered in a knee injury at the age of forty according to the genetic schedule given by his father with his life, and this powerful detail about the inheritance of life was called "too late" at the same time. It is not that the people in the play fulfill their filial piety too late, but the effective treatment of the creators comes too late. "Life has only just begun at the age of forty" is a classic line from the classic Soviet movie "Moscow Doesn't Believe in Tears" that I love. So, now that you've started, what do you want to do? What can be done? It is a generation of Chinese dramatists who are entering middle age who should ask themselves at this moment, when it is not too late.