Haiwang YUAN
Performance of the play Sunrise, by Cao Yu, performed at Beijing’s People’s Art Theater. The cast of characters—bankers and gangsters, rich widows and prostitutes, scholars and actors—represents a cross section of life in Shanghai in the 1930s. PHOTO BY JOAN LEBOLD COHEN.
Author of the classic Chinese play Leiyu (Thunderstorm), Cao Yu is considered one of the most important playwrights of twentieth-century China. He was instrumental in the acceptance of the Western style play into the
