The Other Shore

The Other Shore Summary | Detailed Summary

The Other Shore is Gao Xingjian's one-act play which explores the human struggle to reach a state of nirvana by crossing the river of life to the other shore. The unconventional staging and characterizations shadow the individual human experiences of solitary struggle for meaning and enlightenment.

The play begins with a small group of actors showing their interactions with each other by the use of ropes. Different emotions are exhibited by various constraints and pulling motions of the ropes. The main actor points out the lessons to be learned by the use of power and force or collaboration depending on the person's strength or willpower.

When the rope lessons are completed, the main actor asks the other actors to let down the ropes and imagine a river in front of them. The actors exhibit different personality characteristics and emotions during this imaginary river crossing. Some people embrace the adventure. Some fear drowning; some have fun imagining fish tickling their toes.

The exertion from the river crossing exhausts the actors, who lie down to rest until individually touched by a woman. She beckons each person to rise. The woman attempts to instruct the people in the basics of language as their knowledge and memories have been erased. The frustration of not being able to speak as before is coupled with the bleak oblivion facing them on this side of the river.

The woman is able to help each person begin to communicate again and to tell each other apart. Soon the actors begin to gain confidence in their abilities once more and converge on the woman, beating and eventually killing her. After the woman's death, the actors gather around her body and comment on her beauty and peacefulness as if she were a statue of Bodhisattva.

One man in the group resisted killing the woman, and this man now chastises the others for killing this woman. She offered only good and wisdom to the people who had just arrived on the other side of the river. The man wants to separate from the crowd, but they persist in following him as their designated leader.

In an effort to elude the crowd, the man encounters his mother, who tells him that he is too ambitious. The man wants to know if he is now in the land of the dead, but the mother cannot answer and walks away.

As the man turns around, he sees a young girl whom he knows from some other time, but he cannot remember her name. The girls disappears into the crowd of actors, and the man tells all the actors that they need to leave this place and find homes where they can dry their clothes and drink hot tea.

The young girl appears again, but her name still eludes the man. She breaks free of his grasp when he tries to catch her. In exasperation, the man tells the crowd to stop following him because of his need for some peace and quiet. The man does not feel capable of being the group's leader, as he has experienced the same pains and frustrations as they have.

This sense of misery makes the man collapse to the floor and wail while writhing in the fetal position. Eventually, the man rises, and the crowd follows him. They encounter another man playing cards and drinking under a dim light. The card player engages the crowd to play a card game with him, and some welcome it while some are skeptical. Eventually, all take a turn at playing.

During the game, losers must stick a piece of paper on their faces, and the eventual winner will have some fine wine. After awhile, it becomes obvious to the man that the game is rigged and that no one in the group will prevail. He tries to get the crowd to move away. The other actors in the crowd enjoy the game and will not go with the man, and he starts to question his own logic.

Suddenly, a woman appears onstage in a white skirt and envelops herself and the man in the cloth of her garment. Drumbeats sound, and a monk appears followed by a Zen Master and the rest of the crowd. As the Zen Master chants, the man sees the young girl again and tries to touch her, but he is stopped and reprimanded by his father.

The young girl disappears, and the man does not understand why he has to leave the scene because it is not raining. The father says that is will rain sooner or later. The man does not understand why the father has carried an umbrella his entire life and feels that the father has brought it upon himself. The father is hurt by the man's insolence and sends his son away from him.

The man turns and finds himself facing a wall of people, and he can break through only by paying an old woman with something more than the single coin he has in his pocket. The man surrenders a gold-nibbed pen, which had been a gift from his mother, and the old woman allows the man to enter through the hole in the wall.

On the other side, the man encounters a carnival-like scene. A man is selling dogskin plasters to cure a variety of ailments, and a woman is being taunted for being a whore. The woman responds to the people in the crowd by saying that the men have slept with her and that the women are afraid that their husbands have been with her. Eventually, the crowd tires of the woman. They bind and gag her and take her away.

The man reappears on the stage followed by his shadow, which responds to statements the man makes about the stages of life. The shadow tells the man that it is able to say things that the man cannot say. The man tells his shadow that he is looking for something that he cannot find, and the shadow taunts the man by telling him that he probably does not even know what he is looking for.

The man and his shadow then meet a few other people, who tell the man what they are looking for; a comfortable place to sit, a rice bowl and someone to love are some of the responses. The man admits that he does not know what he is looking for, and the others taunt him for being strange.

The man still desires to be left alone to go to another place, but the others will not let him even though the man declares that he is not interested in searching for anything. The other people are still searching, though, and will not let the man go anywhere until they have finished.

A man called the stable keeper will not allow the man to pass by, and the crowd thinks the man is a troublemaker for wanting to leave them. Finally, the stable keeper tells the man that he may pass but that the man must crawl under the stable keeper's crotch. The man does this to the delight of the crowd and finds a key which the man uses to open a huge imaginary door.

Inside the imaginary room mannequins await. They move at first to the man's ministrations, but they soon take on movements of their own, dancing around the man. He escapes by crawling away from the scene. The mannequins disappear, and the man's shadow returns and begins to talk about the man's life passages through dark and lonely periods.

The man's shadow claims that the man is full of self-pity, willing to give up and never be found. The man begins to move through a crowd of people symbolizing trees, which all berate the man for not being generous and brave in his lifetime. The man's shadow intervenes, and the crowd retreats. The shadow tells the man that it is his heart and drags the now exhausted and feeble man off the stage as the crowd follows.

The actors reappear onstage once more, and various conversations are heard about dinner plans, someone's kitten, poetry and even love. The sound of a crying baby is heard, and a voice responds in comfort. One of the actors comments on the stupidity of the play, and they discuss their plans to get home as the sound of a car's ignition is heard offstage.