Chinese playwright Cao Yu (1910 - 1996) was an innovator of the "huaju" or "spoken play" genre, even referred to by many as "the Shakespeare of China." His 1933 play "The Thunderstorm" marked the height of Chinese Modern Drama and remains one of the most celebrated plays of any period.
Early Life
Cao Yu was a professional pseudonym for Wan Jiabao, born on September 24, 1910 in Qianjiang Country in the Hubei Province of China. He was raised in Tianjin (Tientsin) where his father worked as a bureaucrat, serving as secretary to President Li Yuanhong at one time. Cao Yu's mother died when he was still just a child, but he remembered attending traditional Chinese theatre productions with her at the early age of three. He also learned early that he had a gift for expressing himself through writing, and even recalled composing sentimental poetry as a child - a tendency that would blossom into a finely-honed aesthetic talent in his later literary career.
Education
Cao Yu attended Nankai Middle School in Tianjin from 1922 to 1928. While enrolled there, he eagerly joined Nankai Middle School's New Theatre Troupe - an exceptionally innovative and well-established Western-style the-atre program in northern China. The troupe flourished under the tutelage of well-known dramatist, Zhang Pengchun. Cao Yu, a young teen, proved to be a natural at acting - particularly when forced to play female roles - and he used the experience as an opportunity to absorb the spirit and minutiae of the theatrical environment. Performing as an actor helped Cao Yu develop an acute perception of the larger picture as a playwright - allowing him to write for and relate to the actors he later directed in his own productions. After finishing at the Middle School, Cao Yu was enrolled at Nankai University in Tianjin from 1928 to 1930 with the intention of studying political economy. The draw of the arts was strong, however, and he soon transferred to the western literature program at Qinghua (sometimes spelled "Tsinghua") University in Beijing and studied there from 1930 to 1933. The years Cao Yu spent at Qinghua proved to be very influential for his development as a writer. The young author read works by playwrights like Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw and Eugene O'Neill - all of whom used drama at one time or another to challenge social corruption. Cao Yu admired this dynamic, and developed it to serve as a platform in his own early writing. From 1935 to 1940 Cao Yu taught at the National Academy of Dramatic Art in Nanjing, and spent some time serving as Dean of that institution. He also spent a short time in 1940 teaching English to students of the Women's Normal College in Hubei Province. Before graduating from Qinghua, however, Cao Yu unknowingly launched his career as a playwright when he wrote and staged The Thunderstorm.
Life as a Playwright
While still a student at Qinghua University, Cao Yu wrote and published his first significant play at the age of 24, titled The Thunderstorm (Leiyu, 1933). The work was described by critics from the Welcome to China website as "a full-length modern drama [that] features the complicated relationships among the members and servants of a large well-off family and [their] disintegration as a result of the morbidity and corruption in old China." This landmark drama was adapted for film twice and was even performed as a ballet in 1983 by the Shanghai Ballet Troupe. The next play in what would turn out to be Cao Yu's dramatic trilogy was "Sunrise" (Richu, 1934) - a tale of vice and opulence among the rich portrayed in stark contrast to the misery of the poor in old China. This play, too, was adapted for film as well as performed as a musical by the Musical Center of China. Cao Yu's daughter, Wan Fang, wrote the scripts for both the film, and the musical staging. The final play in Cao Yu's trilogy was "Wilderness" (Yuanye, 1935) - described by Eric Pace's New York Times 1996 obituary as a story about "an unjustly imprisoned peasant who escapes to get revenge on a family of rich, corrupt landowners". New York Times critic Ben Brantley, who saw "Wilderness" staged at the Manhattan's Playhouse 46 by the Pan Asian Repertory in English in 1994 described Cao Yu's third drama as "a fascinating example of a transitional society's theater in search of a new form." Other popular plays written by Cao Yu included "Metamorphosis" (Shuibian, 1940), "Peking Man" (Beijing Ren, 1940) and a 1941 dramatic adaptation of Ba Jin's novel, "The Family" (Jia). While all of what Cao Yu produced was well-accepted by critics and audiences alike, none of his later works ever prompted the intense response and lofty praise that The Thunderstorm enjoyed.
The huaju genre - sometimes translated "word drama" or "spoken play" and referred to as Modern Chinese Drama - differed from the musically vocal traditional Chinese dramas in which the players sang operatically. Cao Yu was particularly adept at crafting and directing vivid, resonant female characters, and he displayed a gift for dialogue that was described in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Drama as "snappy, minutely detailed [and] 'psychological' …" The adoption and adaptation of the spoken Western format did not lead to mimicry as far as Cao Yu was concerned. One literary source from the Renditions website of Chinese culture expressed that "Although heavily influenced by Western theatre, [Cao Yu's] plays are thoroughly Chinese in manner and material." Although Cao Yu was not the only playwright dedicated to presenting and exploring the cultural and social changes that had taken place during and after the country's transformation from "Old China" to "New China", he was certainly the most prominent, and his efforts did not go unnoticed. In 1936, The Thunderstorm won the Dagong Bao Literary Prize, and Cao Yu enjoyed his pick of political titles and positions.
Beyond the Stage
In 1937 Cao Yu co-founded the Dramatic Society of China, and he spent 1939 as an instructor at the Sichuan National Dramatic School. He married Zheng Xiu in 1939, and they had two daughters, but were divorced in 1951. While Cao Yu was adept at disseminating social questions via the stage, he also found other ways to reach people, which included using the power of academics to provide people with a view inside Chinese society. In 1946 he was invited, along with peer Lao She, to take part in a lecture tour of the United States, educating academic audiences about Chinese drama. He welcomed the opportunity, and spoke eloquently about the infusion of Western character into Eastern culture. In March of 1949 he served as a Chinese delegate at the World Peace Council Session held in Prague, and two years later he married his second wife, Deng Yisheng, and had two more daughters before she died in 1980. Cao Yu, alongside his colleagues Jiao Juyin, Ouyang Shanzun and Zhao Qiyang founded the Beijing People's Art Theatre in 1952 and in May of 1956, Cao Yu was appointed as its director.
In July of 1956, Cao Yu officially joined the Chinese Communist Party in response to a movement to enlist founding thinkers. He had, in his life and career, been appointed to numerous political positions, until China's Cultural Revolution. In December of 1966, Cao Yu was labeled a counterrevolutionary and - like so many other Chinese intellectuals - accused of bourgeois thinking. Accused of dissident behavior due to the ways in which his plays challenged audiences to think and question social inequalities and injustices, he joined the ranks of other artists and academics that were seen as both dangerous and arrogant. The Revolution sought to restore a sense of practical humility to the intellectual population, and in compliance with this Cao Yu was taken from his home in the middle of the night and sent to a "re-education" camp in the countryside. He and his peers spent the prescribed amount of time performing manual labor and cultivating the required level of social meekness. The Cambridge Guide to Theatre describes how Cao Yu was "rehabilitated" and eventually reintroduced as a "father figure of the modern theatre."
Cao Yu spent the time in the countryside and the rest of the Revolution "creatively inactive", and returned with a propaganda piece titled "Bright Skies" - sometimes translated "Clear, Bright Day" - (Minglangde tian, 1956), which was performed at the Beijing People's Art Theatre and touched on more modern issues such as the medical community and germ warfare. William Dolby of the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Drama's noted how "In his earlier plays Cao was concerned with conflicts within family and society between the traditional and new aspirations and ethics … something of the style remains in his more recent plays (1984), which often assert, however, a vigorous ideological mood." Approximately ten years later, in January of 1975, Cao Yu made his first public appearance since his denunciation, and was woven back into the culture. He was offered and accepted many more political appointments throughout the remainder of his life and was the recipient of numerous awards, including the French Légion d'Honneur awarded in 1987. His second wife had died during the Cultural Revolution, and he married a third time (Li Yuru) at the end of his life. Critics agreed that the work he produced post-Cultural Revolution was somewhat tainted by transparent propagandistic agendas, but that Cao Yu remained a master of his craft.
End Scene
Cao Yu died on December 13, 1996 in Beijing, China. He was 86 years old when he passed, and had been hospitalized for eight years prior to his death. While this gifted author is no longer generating new works, his plays continue to move audiences all over the world and have been translated into multiple languages including Japanese, Russian and English. Awards have been endowed in Cao Yu's name, such as the Cao Yu Drama Literature Awards held in Xi'an - the capital of the Shaanxi Province in northwestern China - in November of 2000. His dramatic trilogy (Thunderstorm, Sunrise and Wilderness) is considered by critics to be the culmination of Chinese drama's growth, and his prowess is made all the more significant by the fact that playwrights were constantly facing the challenge of attracting audiences in a time of increasing media saturation - fighting for attention with pop music, television programs and variety game shows.
Another tribute created in Cao Yu's memory was Wang Mei's 2002 landmark modern dance drama, "Thunder and Rain." Editor and journalist Richard Lee of www.chinataiwan.org explained that although "modern dance [in China] is often considered an 'insider's art' because of its complex expression and lack of mass popularity … one woman with a fighting spirit has pushed this peripheral art to the forefront of China's artistic scene. Wang Mei, a professor of choreography at Beijing's Dance Academy, is considered one of China's premier modern dance choreographers. 'Thunder and Rain', her signature work, is recognized as China's first modern dance drama … adapted from the late literary giant Cao Yu's trademark play 'Thunderstorm', Wang Mei's 'Thunder and Rain' [was a] huge success [and] marked a watershed in Chinese modern dance." Cao Yu was truly a man of many talents, with capabilities as an actor, a director, a screenwriter and a playwright. While the Chinese Modern Drama genre saw its peak with Cao Yu's early works, the combative spirit of his accomplishments has cast a significant shadow on the face of modern theatre.
Books
The Cambridge Biographical Encyclopedia: Second Edition, edited by David Crystal, Cambridge University Press, 1998.
The Cambridge Guide to Theatre, edited by Martin Banham, Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Chambers Biographical Dictionary, edited by Melanie Parry, Chambers Harrap Publishers, Ltd., 1997.
Dolby, William, International Dictionary of Theatre: Playwrights, edited by Mark Hawkins-Dady, St. James Press, 1994.
Dolby, William, McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Drama, edited by Stanley Hochman, McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1984.
The International Who's Who 1993 - 94: Fifty-Seventh Edition, Europa Publications, Ltd., 1993.
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance: Vol. 1 AL, edited by Dennis Kennedy, Oxford University Press, 2003.
The Far East and Australasia 1980 - 81, Europa Publications, Ltd., 1980.
Who's Who in the People's Republic of China: Second Edition, edited by Wolfgang Bartke, Institute of Asian Affairs, 1987.
Periodicals
New York Times, December 16, 1996.
Online
"Cao Yu," Beijing People's Art Theatre, http://www.bjry.com/english/founder.jsp (January 5, 2006).
"Cao Yu," Encyclopedia Britannica Online, http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9104151 (January 5, 2006).
"Cao Yu," Hubei, http://www.cnhubei.com/200502/ca677340.htm (January 5, 2006).
"Cao Yu," Renditions, http://www.renditions.org/renditions/authors/caoyu.html (January 5, 2006).
"Cao Yu and His Trilogy," China Culture Information Net, http://english.ccnt.com.cn/?catog=drama&fil;=040301&ads=service_001 (January 5, 2006).
"Cao Yu Drama Literature Awards Announced in Xi'an," People's Daily, http://english.people.com.cn/english/200011/05/eng20001105_54397.html (January 5, 2006).
"Choreographer: Wang Mei," Taiwan, China, http://www.chinataiwan.org/web/webportal/W5180042/Uadmin/A5589184.html (January 9, 2006).
"Modern Chinese Drama," Welcome to China, http://www.wku.edu/∼yuanh/China/drama.htm (January 5, 2006).
