Intoxicated in Drama

By Yi Jiangning

Intoxicated in Drama

By Yi Jiangning

D rama is frivolous rebellion against common manners.

A few years ago,at Beijing People's Art Theatre,I watchedMiss O-hio,a modern drama written by Hanoch Levin,a renowned Israeli dramatist.

The story is about an old beggar who’s been dreaming all his life of whoring an upper-class“Miss Ohio”.On his seventieth birthday,he decided to give himself a comforting gift.However,with his limited funds,a cheap whore is all his craving flesh and soul could have.See, damn frivolous,huh?

As we all struggle between dreams and real life,a talented dramatist is dear to you when he valiantly tears open the beautiful diversity of life and shows you its bowels.Beyond the dreamlike life or lifelike dream of a drama,what belongs to you are but smiles and tears,sighs and compromises.

Sometimes I feel that nothing else but drama is humanitarian.When I watch TV,drama channel and children’channel are my only choices.As to movies,I repeatedly watch Kung Fu Panda,and find it pleasantly satisfactory that Po has such a skinny foster father.The American understanding of Chinese theatricality is just wonderful.

Among musical instruments used in drama,erhu is my favorite.I love this folk instrument because I myself was born a countryman.In my childhood memories,once a sow my parents bred somehow refused to feed her newborn piggies,myfatherwouldplayhis self-made erhu outside the pigsty.As it was hard to make a decent opera tune beside dogs,my father made it a weeping-like timbre in Bangzi(a genre of Chineseoperafromthenorthern province of Hebei),which infused all ears in the village.Our sow seemed to enjoy the music as she then lay down against the wall and allowed her babies to suck her nipples.

Well,it was the unique feature of erhu which moved the sow,I think.Even a pig,far from the paragon of animals, appreciates this folk art.

One of my granduncles was an amateur drama actor.When he played the role of Yang Jiye inTwo-wolves Mountain,he was pretty good at performing the scene of the hero’s suicide.The audiences sobbed when he sang:

Yang the mighty hero,

With whose face covered by his tabard,

Is striking his head on Li Ling’s gravestone!

Will the spirits of Su Wu and Li Ling

Brokenheartedly mourn and pity him?

Alas the heaven!

The gods weep for you;

And their tears of grief fall

Upon this earthly world.

This granduncle of mine had a wife who was ardent and strong-minded.In planting,reaping and threshing,she had so good field labor skills as men’s that not a single man dared to make light of her.Her housekeeping skills were also good enough to make soybean paste, salted turnip and mustard,and vinegar. She enjoyed her husband’s performance very much.

As I now recall,once when the hero her husband played killed himself again, she went up to the stage,wavering her slim waist,and giving the dead role a bottle of throat comforting tea.It was so amusing a scene that everybody laughed. It is strange that though I dislike dazzling colors in daily life,and a picture of scarlet plum in a friend’s parlor may kill me,I feel such colors lovable on drama stage.The vivid folk drama does have graceful and pleasing tints for you to appreciate.When a drama begins—when the gongs and drums become noisy and the hues of gold and jade are flickering, I will be willingly intoxicated in its forgetful pleasure which less and less modern people know.

(FromBeijing Literature,Vol.9,2015. Translation:Wang Xiaoke.Illustration selected from Dianshizhai Pictorial)

People are vivid on a wood-carving board