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Raging Waves in the Sea of Desire

2015; Penn State University Press; Volume: 36; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/eugeoneirevi.36.2.0232

2161-4318

Robert Combs,

Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research

The Sichuan Opera Theater of Chengdu is an internationally acclaimed ensemble, which has traveled across the world performing Chinese opera classics such as The White Snake. But in their recent US tour, they have been presenting an unforgettable adaptation of O'Neill's Desire under the Elms, performed by twelve actors and accompanied by sixteen musicians of a traditional Chinese orchestra. The production is more a transformation than an adaptation, as significant parts of O'Neill's play, set in nineteenth-century New England, have been reimagined. The harsh climate, Puritan biblical references, and memories of Eben's dead mother haunting the play with those elms—all of these iconic elements of O'Neill's play have been omitted, along with echoes of Greek legends and hints of Freud. This version takes place within a rich rural household in China, the story being reduced to a melodramatic love triangle. Still, the central conflict of O'Neill's drama is enacted powerfully. The rich old patriarch takes a new wife, who then becomes pregnant by his son. When scandal pushes the young couple to take drastic action, the wife misunderstands her lover's wishes and kills their newborn. Before the police arrive to arrest her, the wife commits suicide, the son takes his own life, and the father sets the estate on fire, dying in the process. The opera ends in a conflagration reminiscent of Wagner's Götterdämmerung.Perhaps any opera plot is customarily excessive. But in Chinese opera, emotional magnification seems to be central to the show. The audience at the Fitzgerald Theatre clearly did not view the drama with the sort of enforced solemn attention one is used to experiencing at the Metropolitan Opera. This audience, 95 percent Chinese families, children in tow, clearly knew what they were coming to see and how to behave while seeing it. They laughed frequently, not only during the “four dancing farmers” scene but even when the story turned ominous. They snacked on candies. The lady sitting next to me gave driving directions over her cellphone to a friend who had gotten lost on her way to the theater. (The friend arrived safely, to the relief of everyone in our row.) A giddy circus atmosphere prevailed. The audience was genial and politely refrained from laughing at the awkwardness of the surtitles (“he came on to his mother, that son of a bitch”) or when a technology glitch wiped them out entirely. They enjoyed themselves.Still, the vision manifested in this production was serious. It aimed at getting behind the tragic events of the story, just as O'Neill did when he experimented with masks in his middle period. Avoiding realistic props, director Zhang Manjun projected startling indicators of emotion onto a large empty stage. His production became a cauldron of expressionistic revelation, with colored lights, flowing scarves, painted faces, acrobatics, and a constant barrage of music hard to describe to anyone who has never heard it. The erhu, a strident Chinese violin that might remind Westerners of a flexatone, a theremin, or even a musical saw, created an eerie mood, while gongs, clacks, and stylized singing expressed characters' emotions more than their behaviors. Ghost figures symbolizing Desire and Temptation appeared and disappeared. The climax of the evening was a dance scene in which the new wife struggled with the decision to kill her baby. The sleeves of her costume flew out, becoming long streamers, as she whirled around the stage, singing, “danger overwhelms me—I am trapped—I feel dizzy—I am in chaos—disaster is imminent—rising wind—please flow away this doubt.” It was as if she were conjuring something demonic from herself that would make her capable of infanticide and, later, inevitably, suicide. Actress Chen Qiaoru's dance of decision and despair was an overwhelming experience in itself, and her performance provoked thunderous applause.This version of Desire under the Elms did not merely foreground the emotions of the play and intensify them; it presented an interpretation, even an analysis. Writer/adapter Xu Fen began with O'Neill's characters, whose natural passions transport them to their fates. But he ultimately detached the audience from circumstantial human conflicts, focusing ultimately upon the archetypal forces themselves by means of visual and auditory spectacle. Raging Waves in the Sea of Desire suggested that desire is rarely experienced in emotional isolation. The surtitles, as long as they lasted, defined the emotional conditions of each scene. First came “Desire in Restlessness” to express the old man's yearning for more life and a new wife, then “Between Joy and Anger” to show the mixed emotions of people O'Neill identified in his works as “possessors selfdispossessed.” Then “Moving Forth and Back” showed lovers breaking through a wall they had been miming in order to make love atop two intertwined chairs. Finally, murder took place “Between Blood and Fire.” O'Neill's play seemed a brilliant choice for this company (like Shakespeare's Macbeth, which they have also performed) because the characters are all so intrinsically passionate.Moving his characters from all too human comedy into spectacular terror, Xu Fen's Chinese version builds to a moral. After the play's tragic ending, we were offered an epilogue, in which Desire appeared on stage in personified form, accusing the “crazy old man” of fundamental ignorance: “If there were no desire, how would you live? If there were only desire, what would life become?” Then all three suicidal characters—young wife, son, and old man—rose and stood together, while a huge white moon, worthy of Wilde's Salomé or Beckett's Godot, shone forth at the back of the stage. Raging Waves in the Sea of Desire presents desire neither as a moral temptation to be resisted nor as a psychological condition to be understood, ironically always too late, but, in an Eastern way, as a force requiring patience, balance, and moderation.I would be remiss not to mention how warmly other members of the audience welcomed me, obviously there as a tourist. Several asked me how I enjoyed it, assuming that I had never seen anything quite like it before. And indeed I had not. I enjoyed it tremendously, I said, and would return in a heartbeat to witness another Chinese opera, especially one produced by the Sichuan Opera Theater of Chengdu.