The three-act Song of Everlasting Sorrow (Chang Hen Ge) play will run from July 3 to 5 at the Grand Chang'an Theater.

The play, adapted from the novel of the same name by Shanghai author Wang Anyi, debuted in Shanghai in April last year. And so far, it has had three runs of 30 shows in the city.

The city's drama center intends to make it a representative piece of the Shanghai repertoire , said Yang Shaolin, general manager of the Shanghai Drama Center.

"As Shanghai's leading theater, we have been looking for a long time to do something that captures Shanghai's character and way of life," says Li Shengying, producer of the adaptation.

"This play has a wonderful way of using the story of a woman's life to capture Shanghai's turbulent culture and changes."

Wang Anyi, 50, began writing fiction in the mid-1970s. Her work is particularly interesting from a feminist perspective.

Many of her later works were striking and controversial, exploring woman's subjectivity and sexuality.

Critics and readers alike consider Wang as one of contemporary China's most important literary voices, particularly for her depiction of China's huge social changes over the two decades.

Song of Everlasting Sorrow is Wang's most popular work, beloved for its rendition of life in Shanghai's old lane houses and the tragic "typical Shanghai girl," Wang Qiyao.

The novel won the Fifth Maodun Literature Award -- China's highest prize for contemporary literature, in 2000.

It is a beautifully written trans-historical epic tracing the trials and tribulations of Wang Qiyao, a former Shanghai teenage beauty pageant winner, against the social and political upheaval from the 1940s to the mid-1980s.

"It is dangerous for a woman to be too beautiful," Wang Qiyao's mother admonishes in the play. "It is much better for a woman to be plain and lead a simple life."

Sure enough, through the course of Wang's novel and its theater adaptation, heroine Wang Qiyao encounters one bitter experience after another because she relies upon her beauty rather than her virtues.

She is left destitute and lonely after a series of ill-advised affairs over the course of four decades.

It took two years for playwright Zhao Yaomin to turn the 376-page novel, which did not contain a line of dialogue, into a coherent script.

"Wang Anyi's works are driven by description and characters, rather than plot and dialogue, which makes them very resistant to adaptation," explained Zhao.

A Shanghai native, Wang delivers with her special feminist sensitivity, delicacy and desire. Yet Zhao's approach seems much more dramatic and somehow comic in places.

Compared to Wang's focus on remorse on one woman's fate, Zhao attaches more attention to pour ridicule on a certain period of time.

He explained the story as "setting against an absurd time, an individual's helpless and ridiculous struggle and suffering ."

Director Su Leci, one of the leading veteran women directors in China, is also a good friend of Wang.

She did a great deal of homework before even thinking about the physical side of directing, discussing concepts with Wang throughout the creative process.

"The novel became famous because of its Shanghai relevance and Old Shanghai nostalgia, even as it satirizes that nostalgia," said Su. "Therefore, we try to catch the characteristics of Shanghai and express the nostalgia.

"Our approach might be very different from a Beijing play and the Beijing audience may question some of the dialogue, the lifestyle and way of thinking.

"But I believe they will be refreshed by the play and like it."

Professor Liu Yuansheng from the Shanghai Academy of Drama designed a shikumen, or stone-arched lane stage setting, which is a unified set with changing spaces.

(China Daily June 25, 2004)