Chinese Theories of Theater and Performance: From Confucius to the Present. Edited and translated by Faye Chunfang Fei. Foreword by Richard Schechner. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999; pp. 213+ xiii. $44.50 hardcover.

Abstract

The Great Wall of language that separates Chinese from Western theatre studies has been a challenging wall to climb until now. The hopeful climber must know both classical and modern Chinese (which are pretty much different languages), as well as, ideally, the strange landscape of postmodern theatre studies. Faye Chunfang Fei's book tries to make some of the vast Chinese literary tradition available to theatre scholars, as well as to sinologists. This is a daunting task and we should applaud her for taking it on. As a collection of interesting essays, the anthology is a good read, competently translated, and provides some invaluable and little-known texts. However, no historical anthology is objective, and what gets put in or left out determines how the history of the genre (and in this case, the nation) is constructed. This collection constructs a potentially misleading history for Chinese theatre, and thus unfortunately gets stuck halfway across the wall.