The other shore: The search for a 'spiritual home' in contemporary Chinese drama

This dissertation is a survey and analytical study of Post-Cultural Revolution Drama in the People's Republic (with some reference to Taiwan) as a continued effort to identify national ideals, looking to "other shores" of the West and increasingly to China's own cultural past. A recurring theme among representative plays is the religious quest for salvation, each chapter treating one of three discernible phases in the evolving shape of Chinese drama. Chapter One characterizes the experimental breaks from Realism in the early New Era, following in the path of the Western avant-garde movement which saw theater as a means to spiritual renewal, and sought to recover the original ritual aspect of theater, taking as its models medicine and the church. Interestingly, elements of this politically radical program are used in plays that serve an orthodox nationalistic vision in the Chinese context. Dramatists reassume the May Fourth mission of national salvation as an unfinished project, restoring the writer/intellectual to the sacred role of society's moral guardian. Chapter Two, beginning around 1985, characterizes growing diversity in the theater venue as "cultural reassessment" (wenhua fansi) deepens. History is acted out on stage as myth, along with ritual elements toward building a national essence--some in order to critique it, and others in order to celebrate it. Western religious and other archetypes are incorporated, as if in order to universalize certain humanist ideals. Chapter Three addresses the as yet elusive "Post-New Era" since 1989, where the already existing gap between "serious" theater and pure entertainment widens to an extreme. In a global consumerist environment becoming more like American society, the definition of "successful theater" in China at this transitional time is ambiguous at best. For that generation of traditional humanist intellectuals rooted in an idealism harking back to the May Fourth era and even earlier, this takeover of the stage by popular culture stands as a crisis and moral decay. But for many others the decentering of that tradition means new artistic freedom. Whether a sign of "hope" or "despair," the fundamental "shaking-up" effect of recent social, economic, and political change on Chinese theater promises dramatic developments and truly lively arts to come.; Methodology for this study included collection and analysis of play scripts, secondary materials, and performance-related notes not previously compiled or translated. The theoretical framework emerged also through interviews with members of the theater community in Beijing (and Taipei) and attending live performances, as well as a week-long international conference held in Beijing on "China's Little Theater Movement" in November, 1993, which consisted of performances by various regional Chinese theater companies accompanied by discussion sessions.