Rarely does a Chinese opera receive as much attention these days as the National Fu-hsing Chinese Opera Theater’s production of Pan Chin-lien(潘金蓮). An updated version of centuries-old story about an adulterous woman who murders her husband, the work has been analyzed at length by critics, scholars, and even feminists since its appearance last December at the National Theater in Taipei.
Several months before the play’s debut, newspaper reports were already talking about the controversial script. Unlike the original story, which judges Pan strictly by her acts, this one presents her as a victim of male-dominated circumstances rather than simply an unvirtuous woman. It does so by bringing in new characters who periodically step forward and comment on Pan’s fate as it unfolds, a theatrical device unheard of in traditional opera. Written by mainland playwright Wei Ming-lun(魏明倫) in 1982, the opera was first stage in 1986 in Szechuan. Called The Absurd Version of Pan Chin-lien, it proved a highly popular success, with more than one hundred performances in cities throughout the mainland. But from the beginning it polarized reviewers because of Wei’s unorthodox approach.
The Taipei production, directed by newcomer Tracy H.L. Chung(鍾傳幸) and titled A Woman and Four Men, goes even further in questioning the traditional moral assumptions of the story. In addition, Chung gives greater psychological complexity to the characters and experiments with new combinations of opera singing patterns as well as modern lighting and stage effects. The general appearance of the production is still largely in line with conventional work. Set designs are usually kept to a minimum and most of the characters wear the brightly colored embroidered robes and elaborate hats that are hallmarks of Chinese opera. But Chung’s additions, combined with Wei’s innovative commentators, bring the work in line with a growing number of experimental Chinese operas that have been staged in Taiwan in recent years, all part of an interest in making traditional theater more accessible to modern audiences. It was the first such attempt, however, by a highly traditional troupe such as Fuhsing, which is affiliated with the National Fuhsing Dramatic Arts Academy, the island’s premier Chinese opera school.
“There were many reasons why I chose this script for my first work in Taiwan,” says Chung, who studied Western drama at the University of Oklahoma after training in Chinese opera at the Fuhsing Academy. “First, I like the controversial subject. When I saw the script, my first impression was that it was deep enough and left a lot of space for a director to create. Also, perhaps because I myself am a woman, I hoped to offer a more humane vision of this misunderstood woman.”
The opera’s characters are more complex than in the original story. Instead of a cunning shrew, Pan is an innocent girl marred by a twisted fate. Her old master is no longer a refined gentleman, but a depraved hypocrite.
The story of Pan Chin-lien is drawn from classical Chinese literature. Her tale appears in the 14th century All Men Are Brothers and the 16th century Golden Lotus. Pan, a beautiful young servant, angers her master by rejecting his advances. In revenge, he gives her away as the wife of a poor street vendor, a cowardly and impotent middle-aged man whose most distinctive feature is his unusually diminutive height. In the midst of her unhappy marriage, Pan tries to seduce her handsome and virile brother-in-law, Wu Sung, who abruptly and angrily refuses her. She finds another lover in the rich dandy Hsi-Men Ching, and the illicit couple conspire to murder Pan’s pathetic husband. When the crime is disclosed, Wu Sung takes revenge, ruthlessly digging out the heart of Pan Chin-lien with his dagger.
While this story is a mainstay of Chinese opera repertoires, nearly all of its numerous versions have portrayed Pan Chin-lien unsympathetically, as a lewd and shrewd woman who brings on her own miserable fate. And Wu Sung is seen as the righteous man who serves justice by executing his adulterous and murderous sister-in-law.
But the updated script, while following the same basic storyline, puts Pan’s fate into perspective and brings a contemporary moral relativism to the play. This new tone is set in the opening image, which is a flash-forward of the final scene in which Wu Sung is about to kill Pan Chin-lien. The motions of the couple are frozen, and one by one, several other couples appear dispersed across the stage, each holding a pose in which the woman is about to be killed by the man. All are well-known characters who also originated in the book All Men Are Brothers and whose stories have some similarity to Pan Chin-lien.
The action is then re-animated, but just as Wu Sung’s knife is about to fall on Pan’s neck, a woman in modern-day attire suddenly appears at the front of the stage and cries out, “Cut!” The new character, who introduces herself as the director, laments Pan’s unfair treatment and insists that the plot of the story be altered.
Another character representing the story’s 14th century creator, Shih Nai-an (施耐庵), now enters, wearing a traditional scholar’s robe and a wooden mask. He adamantly defends his original plot, arguing that only by killing Pan will justice be fulfilled. A heated debate continues until the director suddenly unmasks the old scholar—and reveals a face painted with a white patch over the nose, the traditional opera makeup for a clown. These two characters continue to appear at intervals throughout the story, taking up the debate over whether Pan deserves her fate.
Actress Chu Ming-ling—“My biggest problem was figuring out how to play the role conceived by the director, and still get the audience’s recognition.”
Female characters from other stories, including those in the opening scene, also show up periodically and appeal on Pan’s behalf. Even Anna Karenina makes an appearance, dressed in a 19th century gown and carrying a parasol. After singing the opening line of Tolstoy’s novel—“All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”—she encourages Pan to fight against her miserable fate.
These “off-text” characters give a whole new twist to the opera, both stylistically and thematically, as well as to the role of the audience. Rather than allow viewers to simply get caught up in the story as it unfolds on stage, this approach encourages a more active, intellectual response to the questions that surround Pan’s fate.
But the running commentary that these characters provide also gives the opera a preachy tone. In most cases, their speeches simply blame the original author of the story for his unfair treatment of Pan or offer some moral lesson of their own. At other times, they merely deplore Pan’s fate. Instead of raising questions in the minds of the audience, they force their view of Pan’s innocence on them. As feminist author Chen Yi-chen (陳怡真) says, “The female director’s character has an imposing, righteous attitude that keeps viewers squirming.”
Liu Hui-fen (劉慧芬), a professor of Chinese opera at the Chinese Culture University, also argues that the moralistic tone of these characters undermines their potential function. Although they represent a type of theatrical device that usually serves to add complexity and new levels of meaning, these characters merely give the story a new level of simplicity. “Because the jury composed by the off-text figures are all sympathetic to Pan Chin-lien,” Liu wrote in a review of the performance, “they are reduced to echoing the established thinking direction and lose their function of debating the possible issues.”
The new version of Pan Chin-lien is more successful in its innovative character portrayals. For example, Pan undergoes a much more believable psychological transformation than found is in the original story. Her development is clearly divided into four stages according to her encounters with the four men in her life. At first she confronts her circumstances courageously, with a fighting spirit, then begins to grieve and pity herself, and gradually succumbs to her desires, until she eventually seeks to escape her fate through immoral means.
When the protagonist first appears, she is not the lascivious virago of the traditional story, or even the spirited, passionate woman found in the mainland production of Wei’s script. Chung presents her instead as an innocent young girl yearning for love. With her ingenuous expression and lithe gestures, she makes an impression of one who is refined and respectable, despite being a lowly servant. She continues to retain a sense of innocence throughout the story, even after committing adultery and murder. “I want to create a Pan Chin-lien totally contrary to tradition,” Chung says. “The more wicked the traditional story makes Pan out to be, the nicer I shape my Pan Chin-lien.”
Vice director Tsao Fu-yung, says Chu used a Western-style approach to prepare for her role—“She made a great effort in studying Pan’s internal transformation.”
In reshaping Pan’s personality—as well as those of the other characters—Chung had to go beyond the strictly defined and usually one-dimensional character types adhered to in traditional Chinese opera. Each of these types represents a figure of a certain age and temperament and has fixed rules regarding gestures, singing style, costumes, and makeup. The original Pan, for example, falls into the po-la-tan role, which is generally a flirtatious and cunning young woman, although the role can be extended to that of the unvirtuous woman. Her gestures and singing style are often lively and quick, sometimes scheming.
But for her Pan, Chung combined the po-la-tan with the role of the hua-tan, which is also flirtatious, but innocent and pleasant, and the role of the hua-shan, which is a more sober woman, one with more well-bred, graceful movements, and higher-quality singing. The new Pan is thus a much more complex character than any found in conventional Chinese opera.
Actress Chu Ming-ling (朱民玲), who played the part of Pan, had to go far beyond her traditional training in order to create this kind of hybrid character. Like nearly all Chinese opera performers, Chu was trained in only one type of role—in her case the hua-tan—and has concentrated her career on perfecting that role. The new Pan Chin-lien role was also demanding because the character appears in nearly every scene—an unusual situation for a hua-tan performer. “From the beginning to the end, she has to be the pillar of the stage,” says vice director Tsao Fu-yung (曹復永), who also played Pan’s dandy lover, Hsi-Men Ching. Even preparing for the role called for methods not commonly used by Chinese opera performers, such as an in-depth analysis of the character’s personality. “She made a great effort in studying Pan’s internal transformation,” Tsao says.
Actor Ding Yang-shih also had to alter the brother-in-law’s conventional staunch personality—“The Wu Sung in this piece has fine and delicate feelings.”
Chu also worried about the audience’s reaction to this updated Pan Chin-lien. She knew she would be presenting a character that would totally defy their expectations. Yet she still had to arouse their sympathy for this new Pan, and also to gain professional respect for her performance. “The prejudice of the traditional repertoire against the role of Pan Chin-lien is deeply entrenched,” Chu says. “She is always a lascivious and wanton shrew. My biggest problem was figuring out how to play the role conceived by the director and still get the audience’s recognition.”
While Chung gives greater depth and understanding to her characterization of Pan, she offers a far less sympathetic portrayal of the men who influence her fate, especially the master that she rejects and the brother-in-law who finally kills her. In the traditional story, for example, the master fits squarely into the lao-sheng role, that of a dignified, highly respectable older man. But for the new character, this is only a facade: underneath he is little more than a hypocritical, dirty old man. This kind of two-faced personality is rare in Chinese opera, in which the audience usually knows immediately whether a character is righteous or evil. “The most difficult thing for me was the old man’s lecherous expression,” says Yeh Fu-jun (葉復潤), who played the role. “The traditional lao-sheng is always a rational and positive part. It was a challenge to portray a scheming lecher, who at the same time is rich, influential, and benign-looking.”
Pan’s brother-in-law, Wu Sung, is also more complex than the detached, unwavering hero of the original version. Although still a righteous man, he displays undercurrents of human frailty. For example, when Pan tries to seduce him, he momentarily loses control. He must tear himself away from a passionate embrace and rush outside into the chilly winter air in order to regain his composure. And at the end of the story, Wu Sung hesitates in killing Pan—it is she who rushes to her would-be lover’s dagger.
Such scenes would be completely out of character for the traditional Wu Sung, who fits into the wu-sheng character type, a brave military man who concentrates more on the precision of his martial arts abilities than on portrayals of emotion. But in Chung’s opera, Wu Sung is a combination of two very different types: the hsiao-sheng, a sensitive and sophisticated young man, and the ching, a powerful, confident, warrior-like role that is best known for its colorful and heavily painted face. “I can’t believe Wu Sung would not be moved by Pan,” Chung explains, “so I merged the tender feelings of the hsiao-sheng with the ching’s heroic temperament.”
Chung chose ching actor Ding Yang-shih (丁揚士) for the part, but required him to adopt more subtle gestures and, most challenging of all, to forego his face paint. “In traditional Chinese opera, it would be impossible for someone like me, who specializes in the ching role, to play Wu Sung,” Ding says. “In this piece, Wu Sung’s face is clearly exposed to the audience. I’m used to the ching’s painted face, which only exposes my eyes and makes the emotional expression indirect and reserved.”
Ding says that rehearsals for the part were often “a torture,” especially when it came to letting his usually unemotional character show the tender, confused feelings that the director wanted him to bring out. “In fact, the ching character rarely falls in love,” he says. “His personality is rather firm and upright. But the Wu Sung in this piece has fine and delicate feelings.”
In addition to creating these hybrid character types, Chung also experiments with new combinations of singing styles. Traditionally, each of the Chinese opera forms from different regions has its own distinctive style. For example, Szechuan opera uses the impassioned, high-pitched chuan style, and Peking opera the more refined and varied pi-huang style. But although Chung’s production is performed as essentially a Peking opera, it uses different singing styles for different characters, drawing from a wide variety of regional opera forms. The old master, for example, sings in the deep-throated natural voice characteristic of the lu style, which originated in Shandong, northeastern China, where the original story of Pan Chin-lien takes place. Chung feels that this style better expresses the overbearing temperament of the character. For Pan, however, she intentionally retains the Pelcing style. “I let her sing in the elegant and exquisite pi-huang style to emphasize her goodness and tenderness,” Chung says.
Director Tracy H.L. Chung was pleased that her production attracted many younger viewers “From them, I see the vigor and the hope for Chinese opera.”
The director adds a number of other unconventional touches to her production as well. She gives a new look, for example, to a group of young gangsters who appear several times in the story. These four characters serve mainly to highlight the personalities of the other characters—the husband’s cowardice, Wu Sung’s virility, the dandy’s cunning. But Chung also exploits their comic relief function. In the midst of the play’s mainly traditional costumes and sets, they appear wearing spiked punk hairdos, chewing betel nuts, and strutting in a kind of moon walk. And every time the four make an entrance, they are accompanied by a sudden flashing of colored lights and loud disco music.
In most of the other scenes, Chung retains the traditional stage setting of Chinese opera, with sets generally limited to a few cloth-covered chairs and tables. But she occasionally employs an oval balcony that slides and turns across the stage, usually carrying the heroine, as a way to fade in and out between scenes. And instead of the plain dark curtain that covers the back of a traditional opera stage, Chung uses backdrops of colorful abstract patterns that change with each act.
Another departure from conventional Chinese opera is Chung’s use of lighting, which she varies with the plot and often uses for intense dramatic purposes. At the end of Act II, for example, huge shadows of Pan, her husband, and a wooden puppet that he has given his wife as a gift are projected against the back of the stage. The image seems to suggest how pathetic the husband is, little more than a puppet himself.
While these kinds of theatrical tricks are innovative additions to the opera, they sometimes lack subtlety in the way they are incorporated into the overall production. Nevertheless, these attempts do provide a sense of visual circulation that appeals to modem viewers—especially younger ones who, having grown up on electronic media, may find it hard to concentrate on the more abstract approach of traditional opera with its emphasis on the subtle singing and movement skills of star performers.
Rehearsing a scene in which the conniving master is rejected by his servant, Pan—“The most difficult thing for me was the old man’s lecherous expression,” says actor Yeh Fu-jun.
The off-text characters, despite their moralizing tone, serve a similar purpose. By bringing a new perspective to an old story, and by questioning the basic ethical assumptions of traditional opera, they make the opera more relevant and appealing to a younger audience. This is something Chung and many others in her field feel is vital if Chinese opera is going to survive. The sense of crisis surrounding the form became more acute late last year when it was announced that three of the main government-run opera troupes would close down by this June due to lack of finances. The strictly traditional nature of their performances attracted mainly an older crowd, and even that audience was dwindling.
It was not surprising then that an audience survey conducted at A Woman and Four Men showed that 95 percent of the audience welcomed the production’s new approach. Only 5 percent said they found it unacceptable or iconoclastic. And most consoling for Chung, many of the viewers were younger people, especially college students. “From them,” she says, “I see the vigor and the hope for Chinese opera.”