Literary anthologies can be challenging things to create, especially when working with translations. The editor must include significant and historically important texts while also incorporating a variety of texts not available from other sources. To that end, Xiaomei Chen has succeeded in compiling a representative canon of modern Chinese drama in which both the significant and the newly available in English are present. Containing twenty-two plays from 1919 to 2000, including eleven from the Republican period, eight from the PRC, one from Taiwan and two from pre-unification Hong Kong, the anthology embodies an excellent cross section of huaju (spoken drama from modern China).

Chen's goal was to anthologize “the best, most popular texts” (which are not always the same thing) for an audience of “general readers and students of Chinese culture alike” (p. 1). She offers a critical and historical introduction that highlights major authors and key texts (including those not represented in the volume) and the major themes and issues throughout twentieth century Chinese drama. Her brief history of huaju begins with the reforms of Liang Qichao and the Spring Willow Society's performances and ends with contemporary pluralism at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The opening essay then introduces the plays in chronological order, which allows a larger tapestry of Chinese theatre history and dramatic literature to emerge. Individual introductions may have served the text differently, including more biographical information on playwrights and production histories of each play, but that is the tradeoff for the bigger picture presented by the comprehensive introduction aimed at general readers and students. Chen also focuses on the political and cultural engagement of huaju, from its origins as a tool of social transformation through each period of modern Chinese history. She also reads Taiwan and Hong Kong as part of the larger world of modern Chinese drama, albeit significantly different in context, purpose, and scope, as well as politically, culturally, and ideologically. The introduction provides copious endnotes and citations, allowing the reader to track down and read in English plays not present in the anthology. In all, it represents a solid overview of modern Chinese drama.

The plays themselves are the ultimate strength of the volume. Present are such crucial texts as Hu Shih's The Main Event in Life (1919); Cao Yu's Thunderstorm (1934) (anthologized, I believe, for the first time, and a welcome presence it is); Lao She's Teahouse (1958); and Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian's Bus Stop (1983); alongside plays available for the first time in English, such as Ding Xilin's A Wasp (1923); Yang Limin's Geologists (1995); and Huang Jisu, Zhang Guangtian, and Shen Lin's Che Guevara (2000). In addition to including plays from Taiwan and Hong Kong, Chen has also included comedies, which are sometimes ignored in favor of “serious” drama but are often of historic import and are always popular with students and audiences.

The volume contains the work of both pioneers in the field such as Edward Gunn and more recent significant scholars such as Shiao-ling Yu, John Weinstein, and Claire Conceison. While I am not qualified to comment on the translations qua translations (I cannot read or speak Mandarin or Cantonese), speaking as both a teacher and director of Asian theatre these translations are eminently playable in English. It is a genuine strength of the volume that the plays read well and also perform well. This volume is valuable not only to scholars of Chinese drama but also to practitioners of theatre looking to expand their canon to include dynamic modern Chinese drama. The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama is the sixth anthology on the topic since Edward M. Gunn's seminal Twentieth Century Chinese Drama: An Anthology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), with which it shares six of sixteen plays, reprinting four (which is very good news, since Gunn's anthology is out of print). There is no overlap of plays with Chen's own Reading the Right Text (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2003) or with Martha P.Y. Cheung and Jane C.C. Lau's An Oxford Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Plays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), and only a single play each with Shiao-ling Yu's Chinese drama after the Cultural Revolution, 1979–1989 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1996) and Yan Haiping's Theatre and Society: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Drama (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998). In other words, Chen's volume contributes significantly to the available huaju texts in English, and will meet needs in multiple disciplines.

Chen concludes her introduction by hoping the volume “will inspire other scholars, students, and general readers to explore the richness of Chinese theatre” (p. 47), and this reviewer hopes it will, too, and believes it can. To that end, this reviewer also hopes that Columbia will soon release a softcover edition better suited to students’ budgets.