关于2025全新中文话剧《褥疮》2025 Nick Fangzheng Wang new play in Chinese, Bedsores

落笔于2022年6月，经历几次重写、大改，有过两次剧本朗读，终于在2025的春节期间，这部剧好像终于成为了我想象中的样子。两年半里，这部文档一直在我的Macbook上开着，有空的时候就会写写——还好这是一部章节式的话剧，不然这么碎片化的写作日程肯定只能帮倒忙。现在回头看，55000字，这还真值得纪念。其实中间有一个版本超过7万字。但是话剧一定要克制。观者需要在对话中想象出那些角色们没说出来的话。于是我花了大半年的时间删了很多——这是我认为整个创作过程中最为困难的步骤。

Started in June 2022, this play has undergone multiple rewrites and major revisions. It has been read aloud twice, and now, finally, during the Spring Festival of 2025, it seems to have taken the shape I originally envisioned. For two and a half years, the document of this play remained open on my MacBook, and I would write whenever I had the time. Thankfully, this is an episodic play—if it weren’t, such a fragmented writing schedule would have been a disaster. Looking back now, it stands at 55,000 words, which feels like a milestone worth commemorating. At one point, an earlier version exceeded 70,000 words. But restraint is essential in playwriting. The audience must imagine what the characters leave unsaid. I spent more than half a year trimming it down—a process that, to me, was the most challenging part of the entire creative journey.

不管怎么样，这是我的第一部剧本作品！初高中的时候，总也会忍不住动笔在课堂上偷偷写一些小故事；讲台上在上物理化学课，我在桌子上偷偷想放学后话剧社的社团活动，写点有的没的。当然那时候我实在看的剧太少。回想后来在Queen‘s读本科的时候，大三大四我还特别选修了编剧方向的课程。现在终于有了自己独立完成的一本话剧，感觉还是很不一样的。“嘿，我也有能力写一部长篇的作品呢！”——就像这样的心思。

No matter what, this is my first completed play! Back in middle and high school in China, I couldn’t help but secretly write little stories in class. While the teacher lectured on physics and chemistry, I would be at my desk, daydreaming about the drama club’s after-school activities and scribbling random ideas. Of course, at that time, I had barely seen any professional plays. Later, while studying at Queen’s University, I deliberately took screenwriting courses in my third and fourth years. Now, having finally completed a full-length play of my own, the feeling is entirely different. “Hey, I can actually write a full-length play!”—That’s the thought in my head.

我是2019年真真正正了解了这部话剧的原型故事。方文武的原型人物离我的生活很近。但是这故事本身离我的生活相当远。描绘四五十年前的生活和意识形态，要么被困在视角的局限性而不得不进行很多阅读调查研究来搜集素材，要么只好顶住“年轻人描绘过去岁月”的轻浮刻板印象而对过去进行虚妄的揣测。我本可以写自己身边的故事甚至是我自己来练练手，但是总舍不得让自己的第一个剧本沦为自我意识过剩的产物。迎难而上！去写一个我完全没有经历过并且只能通过极其有限的资源去了解的时代！

It wasn’t until 2019 that I truly encountered the real-life story that inspired this play. The person upon whom FANG WENWU is based was very close to my life, yet the story itself felt far removed from my personal experiences. Writing about the lives and ideologies of forty or fifty years ago presented a challenge: either I had to conduct extensive research to gather materials, or I had to risk making naive, speculative assumptions about the past. I could have chosen to write about the people around me—or even about myself—to practice, but I couldn’t bring myself to let my first script become a self-indulgent exercise. Instead, I chose to take on a greater challenge: writing about an era I never lived through, relying only on a limited pool of resources to reconstruct it.

剧情大致是，知道了曾经的青梅竹马和革命战友楼竹君去世的消息后，方文武决定开始写回忆录——决定用文字去重新面对当年的自己。随后其妻伊红儿的离世，在让方文武重获“自由”的同时，也让方文武重新审视这四十年的生活对他意味着什么——大家都认为方文武这一生最大的成就便是在其妻伊红儿瘫痪的四十年漫长岁月里，没有让她得过一次褥疮。这部剧通过穿插描绘方文武一家的现实生活和其回忆录中的情节，让观者看见一个“感动城市十大人物”的平凡人生。他自认为一生最大的成就，终于在道德的禁锢、欲望的压迫、历史的嬗变中，得到了诠释。

The story follows FANG WENWU as he decides to write a memoir after learning of the passing of his childhood friend and revolutionary comrade, LOU ZHUJUN. He chooses to confront his past through words. Later, the death of his wife, YI HONG'ER, while granting him "freedom," also forces him to reexamine what the past forty years of his life have truly meant. To the outside world, his greatest achievement was ensuring that YI HONG'ER, despite being bedridden for forty years, never once developed a bedsore. Through an interplay between FANG WENWU’s present reality and the narratives within his memoir, the play presents the seemingly ordinary life of a man once celebrated as one of the "Top Ten Most Inspiring Citizens." In doing so, it reveals how his so-called greatest achievement was shaped by moral constraints, suppressed desires, and the relentless transformations of history.

这部剧其实在主题上十分直截了当，甚至有些老生常谈般的毫无新意——一个绝对的主角，一个男人写的关于男人的剧。为了把方文武这个人物写完整，我决定由两个演员来演绎这个角色。大家可能一眼就看出来了，很像田沁鑫导演的《红玫瑰与白玫瑰》里一角二人的艺术创想。其实不完全相同：我塑造了一个真实的方文武以及，方文武笔下的那个自己。于是就有了“青年方文武”和“老年方文武”两个相辅相成而又相互对立的角色。这样写作妙趣横生：我尤其享受他们同时出现的场景。在我看来戏剧艺术最大的魅力就在于能够实现不可能的对话，塑造不可能的时间的流动、空间的布置，利用”假定性“的原则实现叙述的绝对自由。

The theme of this play is actually quite straightforward—perhaps even cliché. It is a play centered on a single protagonist, written by a man about a man (me). To fully realize the character of FANG WENWU, I decided to have two actors portray him. At first glance, this may remind people of the artistic concept in Tian Qinxin’s Red Rose and White Rose, where one role is played by two people. However, my approach is slightly different: I created both a real-life FANG WENWU and the version of himself that exists in his writing. This led to the dual roles of “YOUNG FANG WENWU” and “OLD FANG WENWU”—two characters who complement yet contradict each other. Writing in this way was immensely enjoyable; I especially relished the scenes where they appear together. To me, the greatest charm of theatre lies in its ability to create impossible dialogues, to manipulate time and space with absolute freedom, and to transcend conventional storytelling through the suppositionality of theatrical forms.

剧本中的女性角色也同样充满魅力。在创作过程中我获得了很多的中肯的意见。大家似乎都对剧本中女性角色的某些行动表示不可思议：人物刻画中似乎并没有体现出时代的局限性——他们的思想似乎太超前了——尽管那些情节、那些人物的选择正是真实故事的那一部分。可能那正是我想要把这件真实的故事舞台化的重要原因之一。

The female characters in the play are equally compelling. Throughout the creative process, I received a lot of valuable feedback. Many people found certain actions of the female characters hard to believe, as if they did not reflect the constraints of their time—their thinking seemed too progressive. Yet, these events and choices were all drawn from real life. Perhaps this very tension is what made me want to adapt this true story for the stage.

褥疮，指的是因为压迫血液循环不畅而导致的皮肤下的溃烂。它又像是人们在生活中永远无法缓解并且去除的痛。可能每晚躺在床上，我们的灵魂就有一处隐隐作痛。人类在遗憾中困知勉行——我们都与灵魂上的那些过去的伤痛共存：那些尽管我们已经活在最幸福的当下却依然让我们流泪的思索。我们所有个体在此刻通过这共享的脆弱之处而彼此连结——感谢戏剧给予我们这个机会。

Bedsores occur when prolonged pressure disrupts blood circulation, leading to tissue breakdown. They are like the persistent, inescapable pain of life itself. Perhaps, every night as we lie in bed, there is some part of our soul that aches quietly.

王方正

Nick Fangzheng Wang

2025.2.8

Richmond Hill

*translated by ChatGPT