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Three kinds of people, Huan says, do not like China's new di rection. "First, the wooden heads— they cannot accept any change. Second, those who have been poisoned by their former training— they don't know how to change. Third, those who are too enthusiastic— they go to the other extreme " Concludes Huan: "There will be a fight between the modern and the traditional in China. But the man who persists in the old ideas will not survive. We are inventing a completely new experiment. How far can we go? That is the question."
THE PLAYWRIGHT. "We are beginning to have real freedom of speech in China." That remark by Tsao Yu, 70, the head of the Chinese Dramatists' Association and one of the country's best-known playwrights, is an exaggeration. There is still considerable supervision of what is written and published in China. But Chinese dramatists have been persistently bold since the Western-style art form was restored in 1979. In the past two years, dozens of plays have criticized China's shortcomings, stressed the personal hardships caused by political turmoil and savagely lampooned leaders who were corrupt or incompetent. Dramatists have also dealt gingerly with what Tsao calls the "once forbidden zone" of love.
Tsao is a gracious host as he welcomes his guests to the living room of his simple but comfortable apartment in the western part of Peking. He has an international reputation and has traveled widely (he went to New York last spring for a revival at Columbia University of his 1940 play Peking Man). So he brings a sophisticated perspective to his assessment of artistic freedom in China. "There is still too much control exercised over films," says Tsao. The 200 new plays performed or published each year fare considerably better. Says he: "There is hardly any interference from the top these days. It is up to each company to decide its own repertory."
Tsao, like most writers, was made a laborer during the Cultural Revolution "We now call that period the 'Ten Years of Catastrophe,' " he says. "Maybe the younger generation was spared, but we suffered terribly. We were deeply mired in a feudal mentality. People took what their superiors said for granted. Everything got reduced to a test of loyalty, and one man's word became law. Still, they couldn't stop us from asking why China was reduced to such a state and what we should do to prevent this from ever happening again. It is the need to explore such questions that caused this great burst of new plays."
With no independent press, it is impossible for a truly dissident author to publish works that go beyond the vague limits set by party authorities. Yet Tsao Yu is optimistic, and understandably so. He remembers that even during the '50s, plays had to have "workers, peasants or soldiers in them." In the standard stereotyped drama, he recalls, "you'd have a hero who becomes a model worker, then gets wounded, but comes back to work before his wounds are healed. Seeing 100 plays was the same as seeing one play. But now things are changing, and we feel the changes profoundly. We may even produce a Eugene O'Neill in China, maybe even our own Shakespeare."