"red Lantern" Comes To Ann Arbor Revolutionary Drama, New Heroes

     'The purpose of our meeting today is precisely to ensure  that literature and art fit well into the whole revolutionary machine as a component part, that they operate as powerful weapons for uniting and educating the people and for attacking and destroying the enemy, and that they help the people fight the enemy with one heart and one mind."

 -- Mao tse-Tung, "Talks  at Yenan Forum, 1942

   Numbers of people in this country have been turned on to revolutionary Chinese ballet, opera and drama, but only through film. This week Ann Arbor gets to experience banners and flags, martial music, choruses of clenched fists and gripping "proletarian" drama live on stage.

    A troupe from the People's Republic hasn't arrived, but the University Theater's production of The Red Lantern has. To the best of anyone's knowledge. this is the English translation 's world premier. One of eight model proletarian operas chosen by the Communist Party in China, The Red Lantern has been adapted into a spoken drama by director John Carter, a University of Michigan graduate student.

   Tuesday morning. the day before the opening of a four night run at the Trueblood Auditorium, John stopped by to talk about what he is doing.

    "The Red Lantern is different from most political theater," John answered in response to our first question. "What we think of as political theater is aimed at changing people's minds, whereas contemporary Chinese theater is based on unity and reinforcement. The performance brings people together and unites them, strengthening them in their resolve against the enemy."

    When John went to work on a pre-existing English translation of the opera this summer, his first task was to change a Peking opera into a spoken drama. This meant transforming the poetic language of the arias into rhythmic expressions of thought, feeling and unity with the people's struggle.

   "The production of the play will be fairly stylized in the Chinese tradition," John told us, "but not as stylized as it would be on the mainland."

   The taut story line centers on a peasant family during the war of resistance against Japan. Li Yu-Ho is a pistol-toting !l member of the underground and a railway switchman, who  must smuggle a code to guerillas in the Cypress Mountains. But before he can deliver it. he is exposed by an informer and trapped along with his mother Granny Li and daughter Tieh-Mei. A railway worker's red signal lantern is the secret liason sign.

   The content of the play is overtly political. and its presentation has been designed to increase the impact. During  scene changes march music strikes up, the stirring "Follow  the Great Road with Chairman Mao" kind of air which the Chinese favor. Red flags adorn the stage, posters the walls, and in the lobby the China Friendship Association has I stocked a literature table, just as in Chinese gatherings.

    The most significant thing about proletarian drama is  not the form. John explained. but the content. "Whenever Westerners think of Asian theater, they think of it as a totality. Actually, there's as much difference between  national Malaysian theater and the Chinese as there is between any kind of drama in the world. Whenever people come to an Asian production, they think about its formal, exotic aspects, but what's revolutionary about contemporary  Chinese theater is that it's broken with the formal tradtion - content is the primary objective."

   The Peking opera emerged out of various regional operas about a century ago. The regional operas had in turn, been developing for several hundred years but became merged, in dialect, costume and presentation with the Peking form, in a process which still continues with the People's Republic's attempts to standardize language.

   "The theater in China is totally different than in this country. Here theater appeals only to a specialized audience. There's little common ground between the audience and the actors and actresses and the relation between them becomes sterile. Americans go to the theater to be entertained and to escape. In China, on the other hand, nearly everyone is into theater at one level or another. Every factory or school has its own troupe. People know the songs, lines and stories of the famous operas by heart, and they perform the same works which they watch other people do."

    "The theater has always been very popular with the Chinese," John told us, "but before 1911 it dealt mostly with the lives of the upper classes. The people's enthusiasm for the theater received a big boost when they discovered it was dealing with their problems."

    "What function do operas like the Red Lantern perform in Chinese society then?" we asked.

   "The play has two functions," answered John, about the time he produced a copy of Chairman Mao's "Talks at the Yenan Forum" from his pocket. "The first is to create proletarian heroes. The Chinese have to create new ones acceptable to the people because all the traditional ones have been rejected, for their class affiliations. Li Yu-Ho and Granny Li become martyr heroes for refusing to surrender the code."

    ''The other function is to show the coming of age of Li Tieh-mei as a Communist. Gradually she learns that her father and grandmother are involved in a struggle to fight oppression, next that the Communist Party is the most natural vehicle. She becomes a Communist in spirit, then watches her father and grandmother put up against a wall and shot. The Japanese let her go because they think she will lead them to the guerillas, and out of an initiation of violence and bloodshed comes a tempered revolutionary. From this point on the play is really finished, but the code has to be delivered and the Japanese wiped out."

     Besides the executions of Li Yu-ho and Granny Li, The Red Lantern features the usual executions of the people's enemies at the end. One party worker breaks under torture and gives Li's name to the Japanese, so at the end he is executed. An even bigger villain is Hadi Yama, the leader of the Japanese. because he was once a Communist himself. He gets shot in the head right on stage too.

    "We've approached the play as an educational experience." explained John, "which is really the only way we call. Most of the cast aren't devout socialists, but they've been educated to be convincing anyway. We're not trying to make Maoists out of the audience, but we would like to put them in touch with the drama of one quarter the world's population."

    ---David Stoll,&Barbara Weinberg

    The last two performances of The Red Lantern are at 8:00pm on Friday and Saturday nights. November 15-16, at the Trueblood Auditorium in the Frieze Building, corner of State and Huron Streets. It's advised that tickets be reserved in advance, through the box office of the Lydia Mendellsohn Theatre in the Michigan League, 764-0450.