Chinese Theater: It’s Long Plays were Unique in the World
Add another thing to the list of things the Chinese invented - Long plays
(Picture of a modern production of The Palace of Eternal Life - performed by the Shanghai Kunqu Opera Troupe)
This essay is part of a set of essays on the topic of Chinese Theater. Other essays are:
One of the most surprising things the Sonoma Sage discovered in his deep dive into Chinese Theater is that some of the Chinese theatrical productions lasted much longer than a few hours. The Sage has discovered there are more than 12 major Long Plays in the Chinese theater.
These plays are unbelievably long and there is nothing like them anywhere in the world.
One of the earliest long plays seems to be the story of the Journey to the West. The book upon which the theater production is based is fairly long but quite repetitive. Time and again the Tang Priest is threatened with death by various evil rulers, fox spirits, demons, and even Buddhist Arhats. Always the Monkey King (Sun Wukong) saves the day by beating his enemies to death with his magical iron staff. Journey to the West was turned into a theatrical production of about 15 acts, which dramatize the best parts of the story such as: Havoc in Heaven, Monkey Kills the White Bone Demon, Monkey Defeats the 18 Arhats, and Monkey Kills the Spider Demon.
Journey to the West was performed as a single 15-Act performance. Now 15 acts is a lot of work. Acts were not of a fixed size but it’s safe to say the average Chinese theater act was at least half an hour long. Thus, a 15-act play was an all day event. The burden imposed on the actors by such a performance was extraordinary, especially since Monkey does a lot of fighting. Fighting in Chinese theater was stylized but it involved a great deal of jumping and leaping about. No one person could do 15-acts. Chinese theater companies had to have entire groups of performers who could work in shifts. By the 1700s, the largest theatrical companies comprised more than 100 people.
The longest play performed in Chinese theater was an introduction to Buddhism called Mulian Saves His Mother. This play had more than 100 acts! The full performance would take 10 to 14 days. If you watched the entire performance, you would understand the basic principles of Buddhist theology and behavior. Theater companies toured southern China month after month, year after year, going to each town, performing this play. For linguistic reasons, each province had its own version of the Mulian Opera. The parallels to the Mystery Plays of Medieval Europe are obvious - for example the York Corpus Christi Plays were performed once a year with the whole cycle taking a month. [Surprisingly, the York Corpus Christi plays are fairly close in time to the first Song Dynasty Mulian Operas - 1376 for the York Mystery, compared with ~1250 for the Mulian Operas. The English Mystery plays stopped being performed when Queen Elizebeth I had them suppressed in 1569. The Mulian Operas were still touring southern China until the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s.]
Other Long Chinese plays include:
The Peach Blossom Fan - written over twenty years ~1780. 65 Acts. Story centers on a failed attempt to prop up the last Ming pretender to the throne in the 1660s.
The Silk Washing Girl - around 60 acts if one includes Stagger a Fish and Yao Li Kills Qing Ji. Written ~1560 and set in the Ancient world (650 BCE).
Peony Pavilion - around 80 acts, and takes eight days to perform. Written ~1600 (the late Ming). Set in the late Song (I think) it’s a domestic drama.
The Three Kingdoms - More than 100 different plays, written at different times and by different authors. About 60 of these plays are important Chinese dramas. Staging all of the Three Kingdoms plays sequentially would take a cast of hundreds and likely about a month.
The Sonoma Sage has identified more Long Plays which take days to perform.
There is nothing like this in the rest of the world, it is unique to China to have non-religious theatrical companies that performed a sequence of plays which told a coherent story which stretched over a week, with performances lasting from noon till nightfall.
Here are some of the implications:
The society must have been rich such that people could afford the time to watch a play for week, consecutively. There must have been a large class of people who didn’t do very much for weeks at a time such that they could watch a long opera.
Many of these Long Plays were not well known, so how would the audience know what was going on if they missed a day?
The Theater companies must have been incredibly well run. Keeping 100 actors on task and supplied with costumes and props for each act must have been like making a modern movie. The logistical side to this must have been as large as the actors, what with the need for sewing costumes, making props, transporting the company from city to city, paying everyone, printing scripts, training for the next show, and so forth. Also, there was a group of musicians, who played with each act and they needed instruments which had to be kept in repair.
The golden age of Long Plays ended around 1800 and in the next 100 years, Theatrical companies would only stage one or two of the famous acts from the Long Plays. This also imposed a large burden on the audience since what sense does a single act in a long drama make?
The Modern Era - Massive TV Series
One characteristic of modern Chinese TV series is they will last for 50, 70, or even 100 episodes. Each episode is in sequence, and none of the later episodes make sense unless you have seen the earlier episodes. It seems clear to the Sage that this idea of massive TV series comes from the old tradition of the Long Plays.
Louis Cha’s (AKA Jin Yong) massive Wuxia novels such as the Legend of the Eagle Heroes, The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber, and The Duke of Mount Deer must also be seen in reference to the Long Plays. Most of the TV adaptations of Cha’s works range from 40 to 100 episodes long and take days to watch.
Conclusion
It is curious that the world has remained unaware of the Chinese invention of the Long Play. The Sage thought Wagner’s Ring Cycle was the epitome of the longest theatrical work (the Ring Cycle takes about 16 hours to perform). It turns out this is the length of a an average Chinese Long Play. The Palace of Eternal Life (50 acts, by Hong Sheng, completed in 1700) is of similar length, all done in highly praised poetic verse.
The Sage admits that despite his decades of research on the history of China, Vietnam, Japan, and Korea, he was also unaware that these Long Plays existed until 2022.