Metro> Expats
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Metro> Expats
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Amazing Grace takes on city
By Chitralekha Basu (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-10-20 13:05
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. |
