Cao Yu's The Thunderstorm - Triceratops Home

dominated by various forms of opera-style theater. The most famous style is the jingju, or
Beijing Opera, which formed in the late Imperial era, was especially popular in the Qing
dynasty, and named after the city in which it was most popular. Before the jingju, the
earliest Chinese operas can be traced back to the Yuan dynasty. Possibly the most well-
known example of Yuan theater is Wang Shifu's Story of the Western Wing, which
according to Stephen H. West and Wilt Idema's introduction to their recent translation,
"outshone all other works in the [zaju, or comedy play] genre because of its format and
quality, and it quickly established itself as the preeminent zaju."2 From the text of the
play, we can see that there were both sung and spoken portions, and that during each act,
only one character was given the sung lines. However, by the time of modern Beijing-
style opera, nearly every character would sing, and what spoken lines existed were
delivered in an exceedingly stylized form. It is not uncommon for modern productions of
Beijing opera to be performed with subtitles displayed on screens beside the stage, to aid
modern audiences in understanding the already-difficult literary-style lines being spoken.
Despite the fact that jingju is the most popular opera style today, Beijing-style opera is
certainly not the only form. There were (and still are today) hundreds of different styles
of regional opera, usually defined by geographical region or province. Yue opera,
developed in Zhejiang province in the early 1900s, is today the second most popular style
of traditional opera, but nearly every province or historically distinct region of China has
2 Wang, Shifu. The Story of the Western Wing. Edited and Translated by West, Stephen H
and Wilt L. Idema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. 3.