Since the initial staging of Che zhan ( Bus Stop), and its brief run in Beijing in 1983, Gao Xingjian's play has been the subject of controversy, identified on one hand as a wholesale adaptation of a Western theatrical model, and on the other as an utter betrayal of modern Chinese cultural practice. Chinese Communist Party critics responding to the play in 1983 cite Gao's favorable public comments on Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot, and the theme of the play (waiting) as a clear indication that Gao's play is simply derivative of this "decadent" Western model---lacking any real connection to the specific conditions of modern China. These Party critics "made meaning" based on a nativist, anti-Occidentalist analysis, layered with arguments about traditional culture and the need to preserve, against an insidious Western "other-world," the Marxist-Leninist Chinese State.;This dissertation seeks to explore---from both the critiques of the Chinese Communist Party, and of literary critics living and working in the West---the ways in which the play itself was overshadowed by the "ideological din" of these two waves of critical response. I exam how these two seemingly dissimilar groups---separated by time, geography, and ideology---share a compatible and ready frame that leads them to reach similar conclusions concerning the source of inspiration, intent, and aesthetic principles present in Gao Xingjian and director Lin Zhaohua's production of Bus Stop . I also explore Bus Stop from the perspective of the artists who created the work; Lin Zhaohua, Gao Xingjian, and actors Xiu Zongdi and Liu Jinrong, and the various techniques that were developed during the rehearsal process.
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