Author ｜
Weijie Song
Abstract ｜
This paper explores the spatial warping and affective mapping of the Yutai Teahouse mainly in Lao She’s 1957 three-act play Teahouse, and its variant constructions in Jiao Juyin and Xia Chun’s classic theatrical adaptation in 1958; Xie Tian’s post-Mao realist film in 1982; Lin Zhaohua’s avant-garde and expressionist stage performance in 1999; He Qun, Ye Guangcen, and Yang Guoqiang’s melodramatic television series released in 2010; as well as Yi Liming’s experimental and ephemeral minimalist reworking of Lao She’s masterpiece in 2010. By depicting the lives of people who frequent the teahouse, a shrinking public space and a symbolic miniature of his native city, the Manchu playwright Lao She buries the three eras of the decline of the Manchu Empire, the chaos of the warlord regimes, and the downfall of the Nationalist government. By interpreting the long sequence of sustained and shifting images of the Yutai teahouse produced from the seventeenyear socialist period to the post-Cold War era, I aim to interpret the teahouse as a physical and psychological place and space, and a warped space-time continuum, that presents the interactions between material deformations and emotional vicissitudes over fifty years. My approach focuses on two aspects: the changing locations of material objects, such as tables, chairs, furniture, and ornaments within the shrinking and warped teahouse; and the intriguing relations between the teahouse and the street, between the interior and exterior spaces, and between nostalgic sympathy, sense of loss, and self-mourning that implode in the teahouse and urban horrors and darkness that extend and explode from within.
keywords ｜
Lao She, Teahouse, multimedia adaptation, spatial warping, emotional vicissitudes