The Last Show of the "Bent and Straight" Troupe: "The Stories People Share Are Still All True"

Zhong Shi'er, one of the troupe's founders, says she doesn't know how everyone else understands the name "Bent and Straight" — it can mean a person's sexual orientation, since everyone has the right to love, or it can mean the road of a life, which has its bends and its straight stretches.

The rule is simple: one person tells a story, and the actors act it out.

The opening story came from a man living with HIV. Tall and broad-shouldered, he said many people don't realize that someone with HIV can look no different from anyone else. He had carried the virus for four years and stuck to his medication.

Another storyteller wanted to talk about gender. Her mother had four daughters in a row and wanted a son so badly that when the fifth daughter was born, she planned to abandon her. She was the daughter who was almost abandoned.

A young woman called 2018 "the year of #MeToo." She had finally talked openly with her parents about being abused as a child, and she had sent a man who tried to grope her in the school library to a police station.

Three stories were about bullying at school. One woman had been seeing a therapist about it for more than ten years; she cried as she told it. Another person pointed out that children can do nothing about it themselves: "Many people here will become parents. We need parents and teachers with the right values, who quietly help children."

Other stories were lighter. A middle-aged man had carried a feeling he never spoke of for twenty years, and found in the end that there was nothing there. A young woman with a buzz cut said high school had felt like a concentration camp, but that she fought back in her dreams. An audience member who had come from Fuzhou said he liked his boyfriend and also liked a guy in the dorm next door, and he didn't think that was a moral problem.

It was January 5th, a Saturday night, and at a performance by Guangzhou's homegrown troupe "Bent and Straight," 15 stories were waiting to be acted out. The troupe's eight actors would start improvising the moment a storyteller put the microphone down. This form of theater is called Playback Theatre — in Chinese, "one person, one story theater." Unlike a conventional play, its improvisation usually carries a story forward by repeating and heightening key images and emotions. It has set forms — the "fluid sculpture," for instance, in which the same line or the same movement is performed three times. It also tends to serve a purpose: healing or release for the storyteller and the audience, which is why a given night sometimes has a theme. Guangzhou has at least three troupes doing this kind of theater.

A middle-aged audience member who had come from Shenzhen said she fell in love with this kind of performance after attending a theater workshop. Her verdict on "Bent and Straight": they had almost no taboos, and they were so unguarded and natural that she felt an instant connection.

The troupe had planned for 250 seats, but nearly 400 people showed up. By 7:45, when the show officially began, the only open space left in the 162-square-meter venue was a narrow ring you could still walk through; everywhere else, people were sitting or standing.

When Bobo, a 23-year-old actor in the troupe, told his mother how big the crowd was, she was amazed. But he decided not to mention that the troupe had run into trouble, and that this was their farewell performance.

1

On December 1st, "Bent and Straight" put on a public show at Watermelon Theater. Watermelon Theater is fairly well known in Guangzhou, but its stage is only about 9 by 5 meters, with just over 60 seats.

About two months had passed since the troupe's previous public show. In that time, "Bent and Straight" had found that booking a theater was no longer easy, and had to move to venues like dance studios instead. Xiao Tang, one of the troupe's main founders, born in 1994, said the word from theater venues was that the name "Bent and Straight" was the reason they were meeting resistance.

"Bent and Straight" grew out of a youth gender-education theater project run by Shanquan Theatre, a nonprofit in Guangzhou. Shanquan Theatre was founded in 2014; its head, Zhong Shi'er, is also one of the founders of "Bent and Straight." Shanquan Theatre works to spread gender education and reduce domestic violence, and one of its main activities is staging performances and organizing events in local communities, some of them funded by the local Women's Federation. But Shanquan Theatre had never held a public performance.

At the end of 2017, Shanquan Theatre began recruiting volunteers. Zhong Shi'er wanted to start a new troupe to put on Playback Theatre shows.

Xiao Tang said that during the Shanquan Theatre period, neither the head nor the volunteers had discussed a name for the new troupe. The volunteers Xinxin, Xiao Qian, and Er Shixiong were at a gathering of Guangzhou's Playback Theatre people when someone asked what the troupe was called, and Xiao Qian suggested "Bent and Straight." That was the first time they wrote the name down. The original intent behind it can be found in the troupe's early posts on its official account: to explore LGBT issues. But last Sunday, when Xiao Tang talked about what the name meant, he said: "It's because we're a group of people with pretty diverse gender identities."

Ten minutes into the December 1st show, while the troupe's directing coach Yang Bingji was talking with an audience member who came often, the theater lights suddenly went out. Police then entered the venue, and troupe members guided the audience out through the back to keep their personal details from being recorded. Yang Bingji was born and raised in Hong Kong. After graduating from the playwriting program at the School of Drama at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, he founded a Hong Kong troupe, FM Theatre Power. In all his years "doing theater," he said, he had never run into anything like this.

The show never went on. At the audience's request, "Bent and Straight" refunded some of that night's tickets.

Every member of the troupe agreed that the incident was the trigger that made them rethink the troupe's future. There had already been disagreement inside the group: should they become more professional — a relatively fixed roster, a steady performance schedule, maybe commercial partnerships and branded merchandise — or should this stay a place where a group of young people pursued a shared interest and made friends? The troupe included two couples who hadn't known each other before joining.

Xiao Tang said that by December, they realized the question was no longer whether or how to turn professional. The question had become whether they could exist at all. Bobo remembered that after that, they were jumpy about everything; a knock at the door during rehearsal was enough to worry them.

At the end of December, the troupe's nine core actors held a group meeting. It ran until three in the morning, and no one objected to disbanding. But people understood the situation differently. Some saw it as a matter of personal safety; others thought it might simply be a decision made earlier than it otherwise would have been. Sam held the second view: it had sped up a choice they had to make anyway — whether to become a professional troupe.

Sam is a freelance theater person; before joining "Bent and Straight," he had also worked on other stage productions. At first he thought Playback Theatre fell short as art. Now he believes a line from Yang Bingji, the troupe's directing coach, gets at the heart of it: theater exists to express what is true, good, and beautiful. "The stories everyone shares are all true" — and if something is true and good, then it is beautiful.

2

Yang Bingji has long flaxen hair, is not tall, and doesn't speak Mandarin well. He began running short-term theater workshops in Guangzhou in September 2017. "This past year, they've all been living wretched lives" — that was how, on Saturday night, he described what the troupe had put itself through in trying to make its public performances more professional.

At first, "Bent and Straight" was a completely amateur troupe. For a long stretch, members rehearsed at home and on rooftop terraces. Their main chance to perform was in the community — 11 community performances over six months.

The lineup wasn't stable. Some were passionate about theater and went to acting workshops every week; others had to disappear for a while to prepare for graduate school entrance exams. They all had day jobs — programmers, kindergarten teachers, social workers, and there were students and part-time translators too. Before joining "Bent and Straight," most of them had never acted.

The actor Xixi is a kindergarten teacher who came to work in Guangzhou a year ago. She wrote on WeChat Moments that she had lived on a tight budget for the past year because of what she spent on acting classes.

On July 7, 2018, three months after "Bent and Straight" was formally established, the troupe held its first public performance, at the Black Box Theater in Guangzhou.

Caibao, the troupe's musician, said she was a nervous wreck during that first show. In Playback Theatre the music is improvised too — musicians usually play guitar, improvising the chords and singing improvised lyrics. Zhang Yu, another musician, felt that performing in the community had been more like providing a service, while performing in a theater felt more like being a real troupe.

After that first show, the troupe went for a late-night meal at a nearby chicken hot pot place. They couldn't hide how excited they were: they played guitar, beat drums, and sang 《海阔天空》 (Boundless Oceans, Vast Skies) and 《倔强》 (Stubborn). Xixi recalled: "We sang until three or four in the morning, and the owner filmed us on his phone. After that, on the same date every month, he knew our group was coming, and he'd push the tables together for us in advance. It was still summer then."

"The wall at the chicken hot pot place said 'Seize the Opportunity.' After that, every time, we'd say we were going to Seize the Opportunity."

The troupe began planning a public show every month and signed a contract with the theater through December. Because of Guangzhou's particular language situation, from October the troupe also split its shows into Cantonese and Mandarin nights. Most drew 70 to 90 people; the largest had 95.

In August, a nonprofit in Changsha invited them to perform there. The show wasn't in a theater but on a rooftop helipad.

Counting community shows and theater performances together, "Bent and Straight" had put on 22 performances before it announced it was disbanding. Four of them were public shows in a theater.

3

Yang Bingji suggested that "Bent and Straight" make its farewell performance a proper occasion. If they were going to say goodbye, they should say goodbye properly, as Sam relayed it.

The venue they found was a rectangular coworking space called Yiqi Kaigong, next to the plaza at the west entrance of an office building in Guangzhou's old town — a place that used to be an abandoned bicycle factory. Right beside it stands a freestanding old house from the Republican era. With the space manager's permission, troupe members moved the desks aside and pushed the sofas and chairs against the walls all around. The stage sat in the middle, ringed with colored silk ribbons (a common Playback Theatre prop). The troupe had never performed on a round stage before, and playing to an audience on all sides was a challenge.

Er Shixiong, an actor with "Bent and Straight," made a five-minute video for the farewell show. The editing was careful, using a shot of a photo being retaken — a "do-over" — as a transition, so that some of the troupe's key moments were introduced twice.

Rehearsal began that afternoon. The night before, Yang Bingji said, he had "yelled at" the actors until two or three in the morning. Before the show, Bobo went up to him to apologize for not being good enough. Yang told him, I just think you should all be able to go further. Then, drawing his words out in a teasing tone, he said, it doesn't matter now — just enjoy yourselves tonight.

Before the curtain, almost every member of the troupe worried that this show might be stopped too. If that happened, refunding the tickets alone would be an enormous job. The performance had five ticket tiers; a support tier added after January 4th started at 188 yuan, and some tiers came with merchandise. The troupe had launched merchandise in November. At the venue, a T-shirt printed with "Any-Body Can Love" sold for 99 yuan.

Fifteen minutes before showtime, every seat was taken. The audience members who couldn't find one were put in an inner ring, sitting on the floor. At 7:50, the actors were introduced. At 8:01, the first story began, the one from the man living with HIV.

"Theater is a magical place like this — people might just be talking over each other, sharing their own things, but everyone gets what they came for," the night's "conductor" said after all 15 stories were done.

Yang Bingji had proposed that if any of the audience members forced to leave on December 1st wanted to tell their story, the show could run longer to make room. He often said that "theater is the art of regret," and given how things stood, he wanted as little regret as possible. A young woman sitting in the inner ring raised her hand and told a story about unrequited love, part bitter and part funny. On December 1st she had invited the person she liked to see "Bent and Straight" with her, and when the lights went out and they hurried away, she left her coat behind. When they went back for it, the police took down their identity details. "I've never had the police write down my information in my whole life!" the person she liked said.

4

Zhong Shi'er is the "conductor" of "Bent and Straight's" Playback Theatre shows. She hands the microphone to the audience members who raise their hands, and she controls the pace of the performance. On Saturday night, she also had to explain why "Bent and Straight" was disbanding.

Before she spoke, many in the audience weren't sure of the real reason. Even her explanation wasn't direct. Besides the lights going out on December 1st, Zhong Shi'er talked about the name "Bent and Straight." She said she didn't know how everyone else understood it — it could mean a person's sexual orientation, since everyone has the right to love, or it could mean the road of a life, which has its bends and its straight stretches.

Some troupe members had heard that, besides the name, the Playback Theatre form itself may have become a problem. Because it depends entirely on the stories audience members choose to tell on the spot, both the performance and the response to it are full of uncertainty. But no one confirmed this.

This form of theater leaves no room for public discussion in the strict sense, yet it sometimes produces another kind of effect. At Saturday night's show, one actor played a villain in the school-bullying story, shouting deliberately at the audience, "I know none of you dare to stand up." Another actor caught that thread — "Will anyone help her?" — shouting just as loudly. Two people got up from the audience first, then more and more, and by the time that story ended, twenty or thirty people were standing inside the performance circle.

"Does everyone know the English word for 'actor'? Actor. Thank you to all the Actors here tonight — people who act," said Zhong Shi'er, the show's "conductor."

The members of "Bent and Straight" each had their own plans. Xiao Qian was torn between social work and acting full time. Sam seemed anything but discouraged. Over the past year and more, besides looking for acting work, he had tried signing with a livestreaming platform, though he was unhappy doing it. Tonight's crowd of nearly 400 convinced him that the troupe's reach had already gone beyond what they themselves imagined, and he hoped it could carry on. Bobo thought it might be better to drop the name — to "unbind" themselves from it.

At the gathering after the show, they sang 《海阔天空》 and 《倔强》 again, and because of the mood that night they added 《送别》 (Farewell). But compared with 《送别》, everyone seemed to prefer the other two.

At the request of those interviewed, all troupe members appear here under the names people call them by every day.

Cover image courtesy of the "Bent and Straight" troupe.