A Report on the "Stories of Mulberry Village" Experiment

Abstract

I have always wanted to create a production, starting with the conception of the script, which would present my thoughts on the development of Chinese modem theatre. I want to further the tradition of realistic drama, to learn the aesthetic principles of China's traditional arts from an advanced perspective, to draw critically from all valuable sources of experimental theatre, including modern theatre. In short, I want to capture the development of theatre arts in the process of dialectically integrating various Chinese and non-Chinese sources. In the winter of I986, I decided to use Zhu Xiaoping's three related stories about the village of Sangshu Ping, literally Village, as the basis for this experiment. These stories touched me deeply. They show our nation's extraordinary resilience and vitality, offer courageous reflections on our nation's fate, and have profound historic substance. Zhu's work also, in my opinion, calls for fundamental social reform. I took major members of the experiments' creative team to the northwestern mountain area twice, where Sangshu Ping is set, in order to do fieldwork for the production. We tried to familiarize ourselves with the characters in their home surroundings, deepen our understanding of the original stories, and enrich our own life experience and thinking. Thereafter, according to the aesthetic principles I had set out and united by a cohesive conception of the drama, Chen Zidu, Yang Jian, and Zhu Xiaoping (the author of the original stories) wrote the script of Stories of Mulberry Village. Chen later also codirected the production.