Understanding The Playground

The Playground poster

The Playground, a fairly cerebral, avant-garde play, just completed a successful 16-performance run in Beijing, and people are still talking about it. In the current issue of Y Weekend, columnist “Thongless Cloud” writes:

The Playground is a hot ticket at the People’s Arts Theater, and the sheer number of young people who are willing to watch this weighty, intellectual play has reportedly shocked theater employees. Apparently the combination of playwright Zou Jingzhi and actress Chen Xiaoyi is a pretty good selling point.

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Audiences generally react to The Playground in one of two ways: they don’t understand it, or it drives them to insomnia…

Below is a short review of the play by Elyse Ribbons, who previously reviewed Leftover Women for Danwei:

The People’s Arts Theater near Wangfujing is a bastion of theatrical arts in China, not just as a theater space available for rent, but as a work unit that produces and performs shows as well. There are three spaces in the theater, with two smaller theaters for contemporary plays, with a larger space for more traditional shows like Lao She’s works, Ibsen, etc. Rarely is the large space used for contemporary shows, so when I heard that the avant-garde play The Playground was being performed on the big stage, I had to go see it.

It’s a very intellectual play about unhappiness and depression, interspersed with amusing stories and anecdotes. You’re never really sure how much of it only exists in the imagination of the main character, Lao Chi, and how much of it are real things that he observes. The set design, a grey cloudscape with a large silver moon and stadium-style step seating, coupled with pale ivory costuming creates an atmosphere of monochrome haziness. In fact, the only time it veers from these color tones is with two female characters in red, both of whom represent sexuality, lust and desire.

Like many other reviewers, I thought the show was great, but not as great as most of them tend to go on about. The alienation of Lao Chi from his own emotions is a contemporary social issue that obviously strikes a chord with many of the audience members, but it wasn’t this grim topic that makes The Playground a good show. It was the depressing, self-involved dialogue being broken up with amusing anecdotes and funny stories played out on the stage that really made the play come to life. The college students making out and arguing in the stands and the purported thief running across the stage kept the show lively and the notes bittersweet rather than blandly sad. As always with the larger stage productions at People’s Arts, the set design and staging were innovative and perfectly apt for the show.

Discussions of death aren’t a new thing in theater, and yet amongst contemporary Chinese playwrights, it’s not a topic that is touched upon often. The Playground has been written up by several publications as the balance to the typical “small play” productions that are silly comedies that never discuss deeper social issues. This desire to become a higher form of theater also ended up leaving some of the audience behind, as several people at the show on Saturday remarked to me that they had really enjoyed the show but did not “get it” or understand the ending. Like many great creative projects, there is a lot going for this show, though it does need to work a bit on making the ending stronger.

Overall, I think this show is an example of the continued growth of the theater industry in Beijing, and I hope to see more productions like it in the future.