Seagull adaptation

Anton Chekhov said of his play “The Seagull” that it had “little action and lots of talk about love,” according to Gavin Quinn, the director of a zany adaptation of the Russian classic that opens Thursday at the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing.

Yet this Chinese version — there’s also an Irish version, to open soon in Dublin — called “The Seagull and Other Birds,” has plenty of action, as well as talk about love.

All the characters of Chekhov’s original are there: the masculine, tormented Konstantin with his unmanageable ambitions (played by Li Kai); his actress mother, Arkadina (Sun Yue); her lover, the middlebrow but successful writer Trigorin (Hui Xiaoli); the ingenue Nina (Wang Jinglei). But the writers of the new play — Mr. Quinn, Ms. Sun and Mr. Hui — have ripped up the old script, tossed it in the air, gathered the pieces and reassembled them into a rollicking examination of what life is, how people don’t really listen to each other and how they don’t really like to tell each other the truth, perhaps especially in China.

“It’s an adaptation of an adaptation,” said Wang Zhaohui of Beijing Square Moon Culture Company, a co-producer with Mr. Quinn’sPan Pan Theater, in an interview during a dress rehearsal on Tuesday.

“It’s very challenging for people who don’t know ‘The Seagull.’ This was the big worry” when the play had its national premiere in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, last month, Ms. Wang said. “But I felt the audience could just go with the action. And they could.”

“The Seagull and Other Birds” is part of the 2014 Beijing Fringe Festival, which opened on Tuesday and runs to Sept. 28. The festival, which is in its seventh year, is called the “China International Youth Theater Festival” in Chinese and is co-sponsored by the Beijing Committee of the Communist Youth League, the China Theater Association and the National Theater of China. The festival will present about 50 plays and 100 performances in 10 venues around the city.

The range of “The Seagull and Other Birds” astonishes. It features the Sorin character singing of his life in the style of the rare Beijing Quju opera form (played by the Quju actor Xu Chengzhang), and spoken excerpts from a popular Chinese talk show comparing the sex in the movie “Lust, Caution” with that of “Brokeback Mountain.” The cast, clad in tutus and leotards, sings along to recordings of the Chinese rocker Cui Jian’s cynical love song “Mr. Red,” the 1958 socialist classic “I Present Oil to the Motherland!” and “I Don’t Like Mondays,” by the Boomtown Rats. It’s a lot to take in, but fortunately for English speakers there will be surtitles for the three-day run.

“For me, it’s just a ‘Seagull,’ ” Ms. Wang said of the new play. Chekhov was an early deconstructionist who questioned the unified narrative of conventional theater, presenting instead a style where people interacted, but often only partially or unsatisfactorily. Ms. Wang said the play was a good fit for China today.

“You see these angry young men,” such as Konstantin, “trying to create something, and it’s very difficult, and life doesn’t change much,” she said. “Doesn’t matter if it’s in Beijing or Dublin or Russia, people still want to create a new form, they all have similar dreams, they will meet similar frustrations. Old people will patronize them.”

In an email from Dublin, to which he returned in August after weeks of rehearsals in Beijing, Mr. Quinn wrote:

The spine of the piece is based on Chekhov’s “The Seagull.” The “Other Birds” in the title refers to various new and old texts that are inserted as plays within the play, as this mirrors Konstantin’s search for new art and new forms in the original. We use two of the most famous Chinese plays, “Thunderstorm” and “Teahouse” and make new five-minute adaptations of those plays. The audience take part in the thunderstorm. [Waving their arms in circles and falling to the floor.]

Then there is a new piece … called “Talk Show,” which curates found text that exists on Chinese television and radio on various random subjects. One subject is about why some mainland Chinese put on Taiwanese accents when they visit Hong Kong.

This experimental piece with a random structure is another example of theater, which is presented to the audience as a pre-play to “The Seagull.” There are also scenes which are influenced by Chinese performance art, such as Kitty [Wang Jinglei, who plays Nina] being tied up with ropes and then running at the audience, shouting about memories/incidents in her childhood related to her father, and then being pulled back violently by the male characters. This of course is tongue and cheek and a humorous investigation of this kind of performance art piece.

Another insert involves a piece influenced by the most popular TV drama in China, the Korean program “The Man From the Stars.” There are several versions as the show changes every night.

Soon to premiere in Dublin is a parallel show called “Americanitis Presents: The Seagull and Other Birds,” which will include far more sexuality than the Chinese version, which like every play shown in an approved theater, had to pass the censors. In the Irish version, there is a discussion of whether it’s appropriate for a mother to enable the sexuality of her disabled son by taking him to the Netherlands to visit prostitutes. “We just can’t talk about that here,” Ms. Wang said.

Behind the mind-bending nature of the Chinese piece, however, is the collaboration among Mr. Quinn, Ms. Wang, the writer-actress Ms. Sun, and many members of the cast, stretching back more than a decade beginning with a performance in Beijing of “Playboy of the Western World” and continuing with “Fight the Landlord.”

What draws Mr. Quinn back to China?

I keep collaborating with Sun Yue and Wang Zhaohui because we have an artistic understanding developed since working with them on “Playboy” 12 years ago, and I want to continue with this work that we started.

When a collaboration works with a producer, writer, actors, it’s best to see it out and see how far it can go. “The Seagull and Other Birds” allows us to have a frame whereby we can explore what theater can be, or could be, in China. It allows us to experiment with form and language in a structured and subtle way, and give Chinese audiences something quite different from the norm. And it demonstrates the endless possibilities of theater as a form, to the artists I work with.

For Ms. Wang, the well-traveled daughter of a writer and an actress (her 85-year-old mother acts in the play, in a wheelchair) who wants to keep her theater as free of commercial values as possible and focus on pure art, the collaboration with Mr. Quinn is a chance to push the boundaries of theater.

“If I may speak honestly, there aren’t many Chinese directors I like to work with,” she said in the interview. “Their style of theater is not that original. It’s hard to see original works, in the sense that, in China, still not that many people have seen the world. They are still seeing things secondhand, though they are trying very hard to see.”

“Gavin is interested in working with Chinese materials, and he respects the creative group equally,” she said. “He respects every new writing, every new actor, everyone’s input. That’s quite different from most Chinese directors.”

Ms. Wang is currently working on a project that involves adapting two films for the stage: “The Goddess,” the 1934 Chinese film starring Ruan Lingyu, and Federico Fellini’s “La Strada.”

“In both films the woman has to sell herself to support her child. We plan to create a story about a contemporary Chinese woman” in a similar situation, she said.