Debra Li

debra_lidan@163.com

“TOMORROW,” a realistic drama by award-winning playwright and director Huo Bingquan, will wrap up its 42-show Chinese tour in Shenzhen this month after performing in 23 cities starting August.

First written in 1996 and based on the real-life story of Hubei Province native Fang Junming, the show produced by Shenzhen Poly Theater has touched the hearts of many audiences and won rave reviews from critics.

With previous productions staged at the National Center for the Performing Arts and the Capital Theater in Beijing, the play won several awards, including the first prize at the Tian Han Drama Literature Awards in 2003 and a Cao Yu Drama Literature Award in 2004.

The current production, directed by Huo himself and casting young talented actors from Shenzhen, premiered at Shenzhen Poly Theater in May last year.

Fang, paralyzed and bedridden for more than three decades due to a practical joke played on him by a boy in 1985, was honored as one of CCTV’s “10 people who moved China” in 2014, 29 years after the accident, partly thanks to Huo’s drama.

Following the classic unities, the show is set in a hospital ward shared by He Liang, a young hero injured during a fight against three armed robbers, and Guan Yunnian, the middle-aged man paralyzed by a practical joke 18 years ago. It turns out He was the boy who faked drowning near the bank of a lake and led Guan to plunge into the shallow waters to “rescue” him, only to hurt his spinal cord to the extent that no recovery was possible. Never knowing his practical joke caused the disaster, He, a sixth-grader then, fled the scene in the dark. The accident left Guan bedridden; his wife left him and their toddler daughter a year later.

A hero widely covered in newspapers and TV reports, He now struggles to come forth with a confession and apology to Guan in public.

All the play’s scenes occur in the 24 hours of a single day.

The show also features a simplistic stage set, with two portable hospital beds, a wheelchair and a folding chair being the only props, so that audiences may concentrate on the story and the performance.

Zhao Jiping, known for soundtracks of movies and TV series such as “Three Kingdoms” (2010), provided the scores for the current production.