News Release

Poster: For an image of the play poster, visit http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/event/BalzacPoster.jpg

Repression meets literature in play at UNC

CHAPEL HILL – Rob Hamilton, a staff member at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was looking for a good book to read on his daily bus ride into work.

He found “Balzac and The Little Chinese Seamstress,” by Chinese-born novelist Dai Sijie, for under $10 at a local bookstore. Captivated by the novel’s poetic story, Hamilton went on to adapt the book for the stage. Soon, theatergoers can see the result.

From June 14 to July 1, a diverse mix of UNC staff, alumni and people from the Triangle community will perform the first production of Hamilton’s play. The communication studies department, part of UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences, will present the work at the Elizabeth Price Kenan Theatre in the Center for Dramatic Art on Country Club Road.

Employing a blend of Eastern and Western stagecraft – complete with masks, live music, multimedia and puppets – “Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress” will be performed Thursdays through Sundays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 3 p.m. Tickets for adults are $10 on Fridays and Saturdays and $8 on Thursdays and Sundays. For students, tickets are  $5 on Fridays and Saturdays and $4 on Thursdays and Sundays. Group discounts are available for 10 or more people. For tickets, call (919) 843-3333.

The book and performance are set against the backdrop of Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and ’70s, when hundreds of thousands of Chinese intellectuals were forcibly sent to peasant villages for “re-education.” “Balzac” tells the tale of two young men sent into the remote mountains of Sichuan for re-education, and what happens when they discover a cache of forbidden Western literature and attempt to re-educate a beautiful little seamstress on their own.  

Published in 2000, the book spent 23 weeks on The New York Times’ bestseller list. Publisher’s Weekly wrote: “This moving, often wrenching short novel by a writer who was himself re-educated in the ’70s tells how two young men weather years of banishment, emphasizing the power of literature to free the mind.”

Hamilton, a technical director and designer in the communication studies department in his day job, directs and designed the production. Adapting “Balzac” for the stage was part of a project he completed to finish his master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Montana.

“Ultimately, books save lives – perhaps the lives of the three young people of ‘Balzac,’caught as they are in a repressive régime with no inkling of any other way of life, or perhaps the life of a lonely child trapped in a nightmare under dysfunctional parents,” Hamilton said. “The capacity to conceive an alternative existence instills in us the hope and the drive to seek out that alternative in order to thrive, to survive. It is in the imagination that we find the true revolution.”

Performance Web site: http://comm.unc.edu/newsevents/Performances/balzacpress

Communication studies contact: Meg McKee, (919) 962-2311, memckee@email.unc.edu
College of Arts and Sciences contact: Kim Spurr, (919) 962-4093, spurrk@email.unc.edu