On a crisp October evening, against a backdrop of 1920s-style furniture and geometric shapes, the space seemed momentarily suspended between past and present. This fall, Wellesley’s Upstage theater group presented Four Short Comedies by writer Ding Xilin, a series of witty one-act plays from 1920s China. Exploring marriage, family and class through sharp humor and irony, the production revealed the timelessness of Ding’s satire.
“They were written a hundred years ago,” said director Yihan Ling ’27, “but the questions about love and hierarchy still feel familiar.”
Professor Claire Conceison, Quanta Professor of Chinese Culture at MIT, brought students from her modern Chinese theater class to the performance.
“In Ding’s plays, we see children outsmarting their parents in their efforts to woo a spouse, and we see actors crossing genders, which was a norm at the time that is now progressive. Tensions between men and women, parents and children — they’re universal,” she said. “Even with changing ideas about gender and family, these conflicts still feel real.”
The production marked the College’s second full-length Chinese-language show, following last year’s Sunrise (《日出》), also directed by Ling. Reflecting on Sunrise, Ling remembers the skepticism when she first proposed the idea last year.
“Someone said it was a bit niche,” she recalls. “They didn’t mean it badly, but as someone who grew up with Chinese theater, it stung a little. Cao Yu is foundational.” She also understood their perspective: for an American liberal arts college, Chinese drama is less familiar.
Another major challenge, Ling said, was time and money. She explained, “We only had about a month to put everything together, and funding was limited. At the start of the production, we learned that our budget had been cut by more than half, which was quite a shock. But we still managed to keep the total cost under a thousand dollars.”
Many members of the cast and crew were working on a full-scale theater production for the first time, yet the team’s resourcefulness carried them through.
“There’s always a way,” Ling smiled. “With everyone’s effort, we made it happen, and made it well. Last year, after Sunrise, a student from the Shanghai Theatre Academy who now studies at Babson asked if we had professional help. When we said no, and that we’d only rehearsed for a month, she couldn’t believe it.”
If Sunrise was a beginning, Four Comedies was a continuation. “Only when it can be repeated and sustained,” Ling shared, “[and] until multilingual theater becomes part of people’s shared understanding, can it truly take root.”
The first three plays, “The Wasp,” “After Drinking” and “Oppression,” used translations by John B. Weinstein and Carsey Yee. For the final play, the cast collaborated with Transforming Stories, Spaces, Lives Fellow Elaine Zhao ’27, under the guidance of Professor Mingwei Song in the East Asian Languages & Cultures (EALC) department to create the translation.
“Each short story had its own rhythm and twist,” said Nadine Gibson ’28. “Sometimes the English punchline came early, so I laughed before others.” Nadine noticed her Chinese-speaking peers laughing at certain cultural jokes, such as “the proletariat rising up against the landlords” with gleeful cheers.
However, language barriers, she noted, didn’t prevent connection. “Even when I didn’t fully get the humor in English, I could pick it up through the actors. Theater created a space where my peers could connect with each other in an honest, authentic way. Being invited into that space, having it open to me as well, felt like a rare and very special gift,” she said. “It would be really exciting to continue putting on plays with different languages, expanding to other languages on campus too.”
The most memorable choice in Wellesley’s production was spatial — not merely in the physical sense, but in the way language, music, acting and culture seemed to fold into one shared space. “It was about collapsing distance,” Ling explains. Some audience members sat directly on stage, among the actors, blurring the line between performance and participation.
Each play closed with a song that lingered like an aftertaste — soft, ironic or faintly melancholic. After “The Wasp,” the lights faded to Sandy Lam’s “Morning,” a song that feels like waking up from a dream too delicate to name. Its quiet clarity mirrored the play’s ending. After all the talk about love and reason, the pale light of understanding remained. “Oppression” ended with Tsai Chin’s “Relief,” her voice aged and tender, almost trembling, a release that feels less like freedom and more like surrender. And when “After Drinking” dissolved into Jenny Tseng’s “Dance with Me Tonight,” the mood shifted again. The song’s smoky charm left the audience suspended between laughter and something deeper, the way all good comedies do.
“I thought of them like anime-style end credits,” Ling said, “They give the audience time to process emotions while shifting tones between plays.”
Conceison described it as “a fun immersive experience for the audience members who chose those seats, and an even funnier layer of comedy for those watching from the regular audience seats.” She imagines that Ding Xilin, could he see it, “would be surprised and delighted” not only by the staging, but by “the sight of Chinese students abroad finding community through these amateur plays he wrote a century ago.”
All performers were students assigned female at birth, though not all use she/her pronouns. Ling described the casting as “a deliberate experiment in gender performance.” Subverting the long tradition of men playing women in Chinese opera, she said, “If they can do that, why not the reverse?”
In Western theater, gender-bending performance has long been a creative tool. In modern Chinese theater, it remains almost untouched. Ling wanted to bridge that gap — to prove that within a contemporary Chinese-language play, an all-female or gender-diverse cast could inhabit canonical roles with authority and grace.
Tracy Chen ’29, who played Fu (夫, “husband”) in “After Drinking,” reflected, “I knew I couldn’t fully understand him. I could only try to imitate him, and that imitation might be influenced by social stereotypes,” she explains. “In Ding’s world, everyone is constrained by patriarchal systems. My character reflects on marriage and its structures, and that fleeting moment of genuine reflection, especially after a few drinks, can already defeat many assumptions. He voices a man’s perspective on the limits of marriage. Ding conveys the ideal male through Fu rather than through a female character, challenging audiences’ assumptions. If people feel it’s strange to hold men to the same standards we expect of women, that’s the point: exposing double standards.”
For Chen, the production became “a small cultural shelter.”
“This play introduced me to so many kind and talented people. It rekindled my love for acting, which I hadn’t really engaged with in high school. Acting allows me to step into a new world, inhabit a character, and to think his thoughts.” She also notes the importance of visibility: “I hope in the future we can publicize earlier so that more students — those who don’t speak Chinese — can come and see what we’re doing.”
By the final curtain, the ensemble — many of them first-time performers — had transformed into a confident team.
“I never felt that theater was limited by language,” Ling said. “Even when I watch plays in languages I don’t understand, I can still feel the story. That’s the experience I want to share with others.” She concluded by quoting a line from the Chinese musical “Butterfly” (蝶）: “I believe, therefore I persist.”
Contact the editors responsible for this story: Hira Khan, Chelsea Tarringer.
