It's called the actor's nightmare. You find yourself onstage in a play you don't know, playing a part you didn't realize you'd been cast in and don't know the lines for.
The actors in The Golden Lotus might well have felt they were in a wide-awake version of that dream when they started rehearsals last month. For here was their director, talking to them about the play, giving them instructions, and they couldn't understand a word he was saying.
The prominent Chinese director and writer Wang Yansong is guest-directing this production, which receives its world premiere at Smith College next week. Working with a student and community cast, Wang communicates through an interpreter, Smith Theater Department member Nan Zhang. The script was translated by Zhang and Josh Steinberg from a text by Wang and Liu Chun.
I recently sat in on a rehearsal and observed this cross-cultural, bilingual process in action. The play is an adaptation of the classic Chinese novel Jin Ping Mei, a kind of Ming Dynasty Fanny Hill. It scandalized proper society with its explicit sexuality and was banned for generations, but is now recognized as ground-breaking for its portrayal of a strong, independent-minded woman making her way in a male-dominated world.
Wang's title character, while beautiful and alluring, is also vain, selfish and utterly unscrupulous. Married to a kind, hard-working but misshapen man, she first tries to seduce his handsome brother, then murders her husband in order to marry a rich man with higher social status.
In a key scene in the play, Golden Lotus (Abbie Chase) has frantic sex with her new husband, Ximen Qing (Draper Harris), who dies at the moment of ecstasy. The movement in the production is quite stylized. As Ximen expires, he falls backward off the bed and rolls offstage, quickly reappearing in the spirit world, manacled to heavy chains, where he encounters the ghosts of his dead wife and Lotus's murdered husband (Meredith Mitchell and Sam Rush).
In this rehearsal, director Wang watched the actors intently as they went over and over the scene and transition. Whenever he stopped the action, his comments were passed on in translation by Zhang, who then relayed the actors' questions back to the director. At one point Wang went onto the stage to physically demonstrate a particular posture to Harris, but for the most part, communication was a rather lengthy verbal back-and-forth.
During a break, I asked the director—with Zhang seated between us—about working though this language barrier. While acknowledging Zhang's fluent assistance, he said the apparent obstacle often helped the creative process.
"The actors are very quick," he said. "A lot of times they will try to guess what I'm saying before Nan finishes the translation. In a way, that creates a little gap of vagueness, but that vagueness in a way stimulates imagination and creativity. Then they will show me what they interpret my instructions to be, and when I see what I like, I say, 'Okay.' Then the actors are even happier, because it feels like something they have created themselves."
I asked Abbie Chase, who is playing the title role, about the communication challenge. How can the director work on line readings when he can't understand the lines? "He can speak very pointedly about how we're saying lines," she assured me. "He picks up on the tone, and gives us criticism that's really relevant. The tone can really cross that language barrier."
The English-language text tries to break through cultural barriers too. Part of Wang's intention in his adaptation is to make this 400-year-old work meaningful for today's audience. The language is colloquial and sprinkled with sometimes startling slang phrases, from "That would ruin your cred" to "What is she—on crack?"
"Artists create by juxtaposing the traditional and the modern," Wang explained. "I do this very often, and I'm fascinated by this method." A chorus of six singers and an original musical score echo Asian pentatonic traditions, and Ming-era China is reflected in the costumes and sets by Kiki Smith and Edward Check, who are New York professionals as well as Smith professors.
Wang's intention, he told me, "is to use a modern, humanistic perspective to look at these characters who were written in the 16th century. Human desires, human corruption, things people will do in the name of love—if you look back at history, there hasn't been much change.""
The Golden Lotus: Oct. 29-Nov. 2, Theater 14, Smith College, Northampton, 585-ARTS.
