Mei Lan-Fang, China's greatest actor (TIME, Feb. 17), began a two weeks' engagement in Manhattan by presenting selections from his repertoire of some 400 plays:
The Suspected Slipper concerns the return of a warrior to his wife after years in battle. All goes well until the couple retire, when the warlord discovers a strange slipper in the nuptial chamber. The wife coquettishly pretends that she has transgressed, that another has been buying her rice, occupying her bed. As she describes him, her raging husband perceives that the description fits one whom he has seen killed that very day. Then the tragic truth is made manifest—that the slipper belongs to the couple's own son, grown to manhood while his father was away.
The End of the "Tiger" General depicts the fate of Fei Chen-O, a court lady who is claimed in marriage by the conqueror of her nation. When the victor sends his "Tiger" General to marry the girl in his stead, Fei Chen-O gets the general exceedingly drunk and stabs him to death in the marriage bed. Then, having revenged her people, she slays herself.
The King's Parting with His Favorite discloses a woebegone king who must hasten off to battle, whom nothing can console until his favorite does her sword dance, after which he is exultant and leaves her to her moaning. Oldest of Mei Lan-Fang's selections, this play was written two centuries before Christ.
Simple as these tales, their presentation is made to seem curious to occidentals by the antique conventions of Chinese drama. A formalized art, devoid of spontaneity and realism, it uses little scenery other than chairs and tables which may represent almost any architectural feature. The actor expresses himself in turn by speech singing, gymnastics and dancing. Fearsome, comic masks and face-painting, costumes, and a whole intricate play of gesture have complex, traditional significances (stooping, for instance, means passing under a lintel, i. e., entering another house). The singing is accompanied by one musician producing whining, squealing sounds on the Hu-ch'in (bamboo bow-and-string instrument), by others tapping wood blocks, striking cymbals, plunking rudimentary banjos. Their approaches to harmony are painful to western ears; their rhythms are often complex syncopations, recognizable by jazz enthusiasts.
Mei Lan-Fang's genius, say his Chinese critics, resides in the perfection with which he executes the bewildering Chinese orthodoxy of posture and diction. Playing his feminine roles he seemed like a painting of Hui Tsung miraculously come to elastic, undulating life. His dances with swords and wands possessed an extraordinarily feline continuity of movement. His falsetto was harsh but expressive. Watching his gait, his play with hands and voluminous sleeves, his tender coquetry, you could understand why Chinese poets have written panegyrics about his eye, smile, shoulder, even his waist.