Amazing Grace takes on city

When Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Wit, directed by Kris Chung, opens at Beijing's Penghao theater on Thursday, a shriveled, shaven-headed terminally-ill patient with huge lanceolate eyes will take center stage.

Vivian Bearing, PhD, a dedicated scholar of metaphysical poetry, will finally begin to make sense of John Donne's Holy Sonnets, reading them in terms of her own cancer-stricken body and febrile imagination.

Looking at Anna Grace, who plays the dying Vivian with unusual panache, it might not be so difficult to imagine that she is determined to give Beijing's English-language theater scene a fresh lease of life, and a contemporary spin.

"Playing Vivian is a little bit out of her character as she is from a musical background," informed director Kris Chung. "But Anna is handling it very confidently. This is what she badly wanted to do."

Ostensibly, Grace is ticking off the items on a rather long to-do list. In one calendar year, Beijing International Theater Experience (BITE), of which she is the executive producer, has staged eight full-length plays, not counting the series of workshops for kids and adults, leading to stage shows.

That's more than half the activity on Beijing's English-language theater scene in a year. Grace is also the prime mover behind Beijing Actors' Workshop, which offers advanced playwriting and play directing workshops, besides guidance with voice training and screen acting, as well as the China International Performing Arts Group, a platform where performance organizations join forces to make themselves better heard.

She arrived in Beijing only in 2007. Originally from the US, Grace was teaching English to uninspired classes in Guizhou when an advert inviting auditions for a Beijing Playhouse production, Guys and Dolls, caught her eye. She flew up, auditioned, got the lead part of Adele and decided to stay in Beijing.

"I came to China with my husband, but now I was in the big city, without a husband, without a home, without any income," Grace recalled. In Beijing she only had a stage to perform on and, as she soon realized, a near-virgin territory for building a culture of informed English-language theater appreciation.

Meeting Canadian Chinese actors Kris Chung and Rene Ng on the night she went to watch Lean, Mean and Green, a BITE production that used the reality theme show format to talk about the environment, in 2008 was a turning point.

Bowled over by the spontaneous irreverence and cocky humor on stage, Grace decided this was where she could test her skills as an actor, director and producer. She came on board BITE and the trio put up the play Death Prom.

"That was interactive theater, a thriller that was creepy, funny and silly, it had a Halloween dance," said Grace.

It was the beginning of a journey that has been as heady as it was challenging.

While each successive play - I Heart Shakespeare (taking the cue from kitsch T-shirt messages), Dirty Dancing, One Night in Beijing, The Orphans, Short Attention Span Theatre, Dummies: the Musical - has seen the company polishing its act, and getting more skilled actors on board, raising the money to mount a production remains a perennial problem.

"Anna is a force of nature in Beijing's theater scene," said fellow expat thespian Ian Reed. "She acts, produces, directs, sings, dances, gives workshops, and pays for the production costs from her own pocket."

"I have got good graces with Penghao theater," said Grace, referring to the venue they use. She has, only recently, agreed to sell ad space for Wit.

Ian Reed, who gives acting workshops to a group of Chinese and expat performers at Club Obiwan every Sunday, is looking at putting together a cast of seasoned actors to act in Shakespeare Reveries.

He has already directed the improvisational collage based on texts of Shakespeare at the New York Fringe Festival.

In Beijing he will be working with a brand new set of multicultural actors, who would, with hope, be able to open up unimaginable facets of the Shakespearean rhetoric by rearranging the sequence, borrowing across plays and playing across genders.

"The actors can embody any character from any Shakespeare play - unfettered by gender, age or type - at any time," said Reed. "They might move from comedy to tragedy to history and back again, often in surprising and unexpected ways."

Reed has been a regular on the New York classical theater scene for about 14 years. Having honed his skills at the Shakespeare Workout at Michael Howard Studios, and the Actors' Movement Studio, he lived quietly in Beijing as an English teacher for about three years.

Auditioning for the BITE production The Orphans early this year changed things.

He landed one of the three parts and met fellow actors Nick Ma and Kris Chung. "I was completely blown away by Kris' talent, wondering how I would match up to him," said Reed.

He became a BITE regular, playing fairy king Oberon in the next production A Midsummer Night's Dream, and giving workshops to aspiring actors.

The ball has started rolling. Reed's one-man show, Wind in the Willows, in which he plays 12 different characters, goes on stage in December. Very recently he was assigned a role in a French film. TV work is pouring in too.

To Grace and Reed's utter delight, the percentage of Chinese in the audience and workshops is growing. To relate better to the culture they live and work in, in A Midsummer Night's Dream Puck spoke his lines in Chinese, taking orders from an English-speaking Oberon. "The play is hinged on misunderstandings between the two and in that respect going back and forth between two languages worked beautifully," said Reed.

(China Daily 10/20/2009 page28)