Cao Yu’s early 20th-century drama Thunderstorm, regarded as a masterpiece in Chinese theater, is dismantled and reassembled in this new interpretation helmed by internationally acclaimed director Wang Chong. Using real-time video editing and sound mixing from action occurring on stage, a hypnotic, near-silent movie unfolds to tell the explicit story of two female characters discovering that they have been cheated on by the same womanizing playboy.

Updating the story to a Beijing official’s home in the 1990s, Wang and his company of Beijing performers reinvent the classic play to reflect the complexities of contemporary capitalist-communist society, the ubiquity of technology and the sex-obsessed global landscape. Chong incorporates live pingtan players, a centuries-old form of traditional Chinese musical storytelling, to create the dialogue and soundtrack onstage.

Watching Thunderstorm 2.0, at the Public Theater’s Under The Radar Festival, is like watching a thunderstorm out in nature, if real thunderstorms could actually get the lights and the sound to match up. Perhaps it is because we are living in the age of the iPhone X that “2.0” seems antiquated, but there is nothing outdated about Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental’s adaptation of Cao Yu’s classic early 20th-century drama, Thunderstorm. Under the masterful direction of Wang Chong, the reimagining of this one-man-two-women tale of infidelity succeeds in reaching a contemporary audience not only through technological feats but through nuanced storytelling and a healthy dose of dark humor. Thunderstorm 2.0 is a melodrama the likes of which the Spanish telenovela can only aspire to, yet the elegance and acting prowess of the cast, led by Wu Zhen and Yu Shixue, allow a subtler theatrical reality to emerge beneath the sometimes absurd actions of the play. The set, a beautifully imagined hybrid of traditional and contemporary elements designed by Li Yi, is divided into five sections — four rooms in the houses where the action of the play takes place, and one large film screen that hangs above th …Read more