Wang Chiang is a broken man. At one point he hands Ms. Wang the household savings in a leather pouch. Might as well be the scrotum it so perfectly resembles. The play is about psychic castration on a scale so immense that your local capon manufactory seems a stud farm by comparison. And it has the vacant businesslike horror of an efficiency expert’s recommendations for Auschwitz.
The Women’s Representative by Sun Yu pulled down first prize in the 1953 Peking People’s Playwriting Contest. Now it’s off-off Broadway playing to packed houses of a dozen. The program states: “Drama as persuasion, as propaganda, and as a means to agitate is of extreme importance to the Communists.” You betcha, Charlie. In Western tragedy the protagonist grows, changes: Supporting players are more or less static. In People’s drama the protagonist is one-dimensional as a posted handbill. He or she enforces change. Ripeness is nothing. There are no Lears, no Hamlets in Peking. To be or not to be has a counterrevolutionary tone. The conjunction “or” has been liquidated. It implies doubt: more than one option. As art, People’s theater comes in just behind a hard-sell TV spot: It is shrill, boring; the flip of a two-headed dime has more dramatic possibilities.
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