Vertebra Theatre Loves Plays About Real Life, and Won’t Duck the Feelings Everyone Faces | Great Little Studios

“Living takes a lot of surface noise and glitter, things that make you laugh right away. But then why do you read books, why do you travel? Sometimes you need something with a different rhythm and depth, something that nourishes and widens your experience of life.”

Asked how Vertebra Theatre picks the plays it stages, Li Qianpeng gives a simple answer: “First it has to move me.”

Since it was founded in 2016, Vertebra Theatre has become a name theatergoers recognize. Li Qianpeng is its founder and artistic director.

In January 2019 the company’s newest production, Father’s Bed 《爸爸的床》, premiered in Shanghai, with Wang Xueqi and Yang Yitong as a father and daughter. Three months after his wife’s death, the father wants to start over at once and remarry soon, and to redo the rooms the way his next wife would like them. The daughter fights him on it, clinging to the old things in the house.

For most of the play the two stand on opposite sides of the stage and talk to each other by telephone, each hemmed in by cardboard boxes. In one scene the father leans against a box and speaks into the handset without effort, while across the stage the daughter throws punches as she demands he keep the old things — his ease against her gasping. At the end the two push over the stacked boxes, and the collapse stands in for their reconciliation.

Looking back on why she turned this Dutch script into a Vertebra Theatre production, Li Qianpeng wrote: “From the opening to the last minute, a tangle of feelings kept surging in me, shifting like a tide but never dropping below a very high pitch… As long as you have a father and a mother, as long as you have family, as long as you have ever felt the warmth of another person, you should come see this play. It has a different point of entry for each of us.”

Li Qianpeng puts great weight on feelings that come out of lived experience. She is never sparing about expressing her own, and she is willing to act on where they push her. “You have to feel it. Don’t judge it rationally, don’t rush to a conclusion.” That is the core of how she understands theater. She founded Vertebra Theatre so she could put her own experience of theater on a stage.

Before starting the company in 2016, Li Qianpeng taught at the Shanghai Theatre Academy. She left Jinan for Shanghai in 1995 after passing the entrance exam, and stayed on to teach after graduating; she has been an acting instructor ever since.

China’s theater world is small, and most of the people in it work in Beijing or Shanghai. Beijingers are blunt, usually convinced their own show is the best one going, and they criticize each other openly. Shanghai is the opposite: it prizes smoothness in person, tact in dealings, and at least the appearance of calm. Li Qianpeng is an oddity in Shanghai. Everyone in the business knows she buys seats at the edge of the house, and that if the stage has not satisfied her within ten minutes, she walks out.

When she criticizes, she spares no one. At first she still worried about the social cost and other people’s face, but she found she could not keep it down. “It was just too awful,” she says. “If you ask me, I can’t lie. I think that’s the most basic, most basic line a person holds — honesty.”

Eventually people around her said: stop going after other people all the time; you may be right, but why don’t you make one yourself? By then she had been watching theater for more than twenty years and found fewer and fewer Chinese productions that gave her any pleasure. Past thirty, she had also been asking herself, “How do I want to live? What’s good and what isn’t? What’s interesting?” After casting around, she decided that what she most wanted was to make some theater she herself thought was good, and to get some pleasure out of it. When Vertebra Theatre was founded in 2016, she had just turned 40.

The company’s first production was An Open Couple, written in 1983 by the Italian playwright and director Dario Fo. In it a husband and wife agree to an open relationship, then discover that living one is harder than they imagined. An Open Couple met the standard Li Qianpeng had set for herself: “It moves me first. And it connects to what people need, remember, or have lived through right now.”

It premiered in May 2016. Li Qianpeng handed the directing to Li Minyuan, a Taiwanese director who had studied and worked in France and now lectures in the dramatic literature department at the Shanghai Theatre Academy. He replaced the script’s fixed ending with an open one, on the grounds that conditions and atmosphere differ somewhat from place to place. At a post-show talk he answered audience questions about the ending: “Would you call this love? I can’t find an answer. Human nature is more complicated than that.”

The other big change was the set. The original’s fairly realist design gave way to a more modern arrangement of square-framed steps, mostly black. The actors had almost no props to work with, so their bodies and a certain amount of improvisation became the show’s main draw.

After An Open Couple came Lungs, in which a couple argue over whether to have a child, and Poison, about a husband and wife who meet again years after losing their only son. The three made up Vertebra Theatre’s first season in 2017, “Shall We Talk,” and all of them turn on how people talk to each other inside an intimate relationship.

That left some audiences with an impression: Vertebra Theatre is drawn to the fine, tangled workings of intimacy, and dresses them in spare but carefully designed stagecraft. For Lungs the company built a set out of two strips of incandescent light and a seesaw that could rotate — a way of showing two people meeting and parting, who holds the floor, and how close or distant they are.

Lungs trailer

But the repertoire soon widened. In the second half of 2017, War 《战》 used bodies and motion to get at work, family, and love, mostly in fragments arranged like montage. The 2018 production Bartleby, the Scrivener was adapted from a short story by Herman Melville, who wrote Moby-Dick, and is about the courage it takes to refuse, to say “no.” And Momo 《默默》, which the company was rehearsing in 2019, comes from the well-known German children’s book Momo and takes up the subject of time.

What the productions share is a grip on ordinary life. Explaining her choice of Bartleby, the Scrivener, Li Qianpeng says that “in a real workplace, people don’t get many chances to say ‘no.’ And precisely because they can’t say it, they may lose a part of themselves.” Vertebra Theatre’s position, she says, has never changed: “We face reality. We don’t run from it.”

The way she picks plays rests on a great deal of theatergoing abroad.

From 2003 on she made frequent research trips to New York, London, and arts and theater festivals elsewhere in Europe. Last February she went to Latvia for a student’s wedding and saw eight plays in seven days, on one of those days going straight from an afternoon show to an evening one — commercial houses, underground venues, even university drama clubs. Not knowing the language is no obstacle. Before going in she does some homework: what the story is, what the director has made before, what the style is like. “The lines matter, but contemporary theater has a rich vocabulary. There’s a lot to watch.”

When she finds something that fits, she tries to buy the rights and produce it herself, from scratch. “Sometimes what gets done here is like dipping mutton in a hot pot — haul it in, give it a swish, put up a Chinese version with the same blocking. The director doesn’t even have to come; send an assistant, copy it off the original. That isn’t making anything. That way we’ll never make anything good.”

Over time the company built up what Li Qianpeng calls a library. “Say a subject interests me, or a novel does — I’ll remember it… They’re all in our heads. Once I’ve taken to a project I won’t forget it as long as I live.”

Watching so much theater also brought her collaborators. Boris von Poser, who directed Bartleby, the Scrivener, was already an “acquaintance”: she had seen the German director’s adaptation of Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades and never got over it. On WeChat Moments she wrote: “A tiny theater carved out of an apartment block, and they dare to take on Pushkin — and it’s terrifically sophisticated…”

“We’ve seen so much theater. This director’s style left a deep mark on me, so when I’m looking for material on a certain subject, I think of him and whether it might suit him.”

Under von Poser, Bartleby, the Scrivener took this form: the back of the stage was lined with screens standing in for office partitions, which doubled as surfaces for projected video. Bartleby, who refuses everything, says almost nothing; the real lead is the lawyer who employs him, played by Wang Chuanjun, who opens with a fifteen-minute monologue laying out this strange, unsettling story for the audience.

As with Bartleby, a European director and a European script plus Chinese actors is now Vertebra Theatre’s usual arrangement. Li Qianpeng prefers European work. American plays strike her as blunt and skin-deep, and in China she cannot find scripts good enough or directors with enough imagination.

By the eighth production, Father’s Bed, some audiences had had enough of the formula. The play looked like a return to the mode of the early An Open Couple and Lungs, and outside comment seemed stuck on the impression the first three had left. On that basis people tried to sum up the company’s style: solid texts, fine-grained dialogue, an interest in how people relate to each other, and sparse but heavily symbolic stage design.

Li Qianpeng rejects labels like these outright. “Have you seen all eight? If you’ve missed even one, you can’t say that.” She gets angry about it: “You haven’t felt it. You’ve just sorted it into a crude box. I have to say, you’re too rational. You’ve lost the ability to feel life.”

Three years in, the company has also raised a core of loyal viewers, more open in outlook, who have taken on her view of theater. “In the audience chat groups we set up after a performance, someone will ask what the theme of the play is, what it’s telling us. The creative team in the group usually doesn’t need to answer, because another audience member will: don’t rush to pin down a theme, feel it first, don’t rush to conclusions.”

But refusing to prejudge a play is not quite the same as refusing considered criticism. Handled badly, insisting on feeling can sound like a way of dodging the argument.

Li Qianpeng has never answered head-on what kind of criticism she can accept. She stresses that people are free not to like something, but that denying a work’s right to exist is frightening. “Some viewers say they love Poison, they love Father’s Bed, because they like the manner of seasoned professional actors — and then they’ll say Lungs has no characterization at all. But did we get Lungs wrong? I don’t think so. Plenty of other people love it. That’s the texture of contemporary theater.”

The company’s Beijing runs draw more extreme reactions than its Shanghai ones, and not only from ticket buyers. After Father’s Bed played in Beijing, a man tore into it in the lobby: too many lines, no business using all those stage devices, it should be an austere, aloof piece where the actors say the words and that’s that.

Learning afterward that he worked in theater himself, Li Qianpeng called it a lapse in composure. She took issue with his premise: “So is this a script reading? If you don’t like it, buy the rights and stage your own version. We don’t hold them exclusively.”

“A lot of the time we won’t agree, but we can both exist, and we can still talk.” Li Qianpeng explains her position in something close to the language of pluralism: “Some people feel that inside their own world they get to pass judgment on you, in obsessive language, extreme language. That is not a healthy condition for a society. It has nothing to do with having a personality. Respecting other people and granting them their existence is one thing; having a personality is another. However much personality you have, it doesn’t entitle you to disrespect other people and their right to exist.”

That fussiness and stubbornness make it hard for her to take direction from anyone else. In three years, every yuan behind Vertebra Theatre has come from Li Qianpeng herself; it has taken no outside investment.

“Plenty of investors tell me they’re in no rush, they’re willing to play a long game. But over that long stretch, they don’t understand theater, and I’d still have to bring them up to speed. Because they will gesture at it, they will point fingers at what they’ve put money into and at the product. That’s exhausting. It drains my energy.”

Worse than that is the idealistic kind of investor. “He’s sure he loves this. But he isn’t really a professional, he doesn’t really understand it, and he thinks he does. How frightening is that? I don’t need to spell it out — half-baked.”

Across those three years, Li Qianpeng kept feeling that “we might fold.” Actors, producers, stage managers — at every link there might be no right person to be found. Money was a problem too. What saved the company was that its first play, An Open Couple, turned a profit early. The show has a lighter feel, and open relationships as a subject can pull in a crowd.

But profit from An Open Couple could not cover the payroll and the cost of mounting new work. What put Vertebra Theatre on solid ground was word of mouth, built up one production at a time. In its first run, like every original Chinese production, the company played almost only in Beijing and Shanghai. By the second and third years, more and more second- and third-tier cities were thinking of Vertebra Theatre when they put together a theater or arts festival; this year Poison has tour dates in four or five of them.

Since February the company has been at work on its first large-house production, Momo. The director, Gil Mehmert, is German; the lead is Wan Qian, who won the Golden Horse Award for best supporting actress for Paradise in Service. It premieres at Shanghai’s Majestic Theatre on April 30 and May 1 and is now in rehearsal — another new test for the company.

Li Qianpeng thinks she has changed since 2016 as well. She says she has grown pickier about theater, and also admits that “I compromise more than I used to. I’ve gotten more tolerant of a lot of things, and I handle them more nimbly.” The clearest sign: when she runs into a bad play now, she accepts that she can simply say nothing. “At least I’m not lying.”

Now and then she shows that tolerance outright. Having criticized part of the audience for being closed off, she says: “You still have to respect what people are able to take in right now. You can’t ignore the level audiences are at as theatergoers.”

She thinks taste has everything to do with what a life happens to hand you. “What you saw first, what you’re watching now, what you’ll go on to see — it’s all fate. Whatever comes into your life is your fate. If the very first thing you see is a great piece of work, you may spend a long time afterward feeling let down, because nothing measures up to it.”

All production stills, photographs, and posters in this article were provided by Vertebra Theatre.

Long cover image: production still from Lungs, photo by Yin Xuefeng.

Cover image: rehearsal for Momo, photo by Bao Yanzhou.