No One Fits 'Huang Pangzi': Beijing People's Art Theatre's Casting Complaint

At 65, Feng Yuanzheng runs the Beijing People's Art Theatre, the company that Lao She's "Teahouse" built, and the casting problem he describes is one an outsider would never predict. Speaking to reporters in Shanghai last week, where the theatre's stripped-down "Hamlet" opened the 25th China Shanghai International Arts Festival, he said what troubles him most in recruitment is not a shortage of talent but a shortage of shapes: the theatre cannot find actresses around 1.55 metres, or actors around 1.70 metres, because the art schools send only one body type. "These days the boys and girls are all tall," he said in comments carried by Daxiang News.

The complaint struck a nerve because of the role he named. "Teahouse", the signature play of a company whose stage tradition still forbids microphones, has a character called Huang Pangzi — Huang the Fatso — the bustling middleman who wades into a quarrel to talk both sides down. It is a small part, and precisely the kind a repertory theatre must always be able to cast: ordinary, round, comic, human. "There's a role in 'Teahouse' called Huang Pangzi, and now the art schools can't produce one," Feng said, in the clip CCTV News cut from the remarks. "An actor isn't just 'tall, rich and handsome' — we have actual roles to hand to young people."

The internet heard a broader verdict. On Weibo the clip trended under the blunt headline "Actors can't find a Huang Pangzi anymore", and Baidu's board carried it as "Actors are all handsome men and pretty women, and Feng Yuanzheng is worried." The most-liked replies ran to sociology, not gossip. "The screen industry's aesthetic keeps narrowing — everyone is competing to be thinner," one wrote. Another put it as a diagnosis: "It isn't that Feng Yuanzheng is strict. It's that the aesthetic has become single-standard." That argument — that faces, like photos, are now run through one filter — has been running all autumn, from the beauty-filter debate an innocuous Weibo post reopened to the casting sheets of the short-drama boom.

There is a mundane reason the heights have drifted, which Feng himself supplied: China's young people are simply taller than the generations the classics were written among, and everyone in the recruitment pool clears the old bar. But the theatre's problem is deeper than nutrition. A state repertory company keeps plays in repertoire for decades and needs a company of types — the stout fixer, the small Dynast-era clerk — while the commercial pipeline upstream now optimises for the face that sells a drama before it streams. Feng's theatre is one of the few employers still hiring for the character sheet rather than the poster.

The immediate stakes are modest: a premiere in Shanghai, a veteran "Teahouse" cast a few retirements from needing replacements for every small part. But the arithmetic behind his complaint is the kind that compounds quietly — a theatre that cannot cast its canon's minors eventually cannot stage its canon. Huang Pangzi, for now, remains written into the play. Finding someone to play him is the part that has stopped working.