Before entering the theater, audience members receive a brief warning: there will be two gunshots.

When the lights come up, the guns are already present. Tucked inside an elegantly tailored overcoat hanging above the stage, they remain visible reminders of a fate waiting to unfold. As relationships unravel and tensions mount, the pistols hover over the production like a Greek chorus of doom — silent, yet inescapable.

This year's opening production of Huichang Theatre Season 004 is Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen's 1891 masterpiece, directed by American theater director Travis Preston.

The story remains familiar. Hedda, the daughter of a military general, finds herself trapped in a suffocating marriage to the uninspiring scholar George Tesman. When her former lover, Ejlert Lovborg, reappears with a manuscript that promises to secure his future, Hedda's jealousy and desire for control set a tragedy in motion. She destroys the manuscript, encourages him toward a "beautiful" death using one of her late father's pistols, and ultimately becomes ensnared by Judge Brack, who discovers her role in the affair. Cornered and humiliated, she turns the second pistol on herself.

Preston, artistic director of the CalArts Center for New Performance and a longtime interpreter of Ibsen, has little interest in reproducing the realist drawing-room drama audiences might expect.

At the beginning of the performance, Hedda lies inside a giant gilded picture frame like a stranded mermaid. Nearby hangs her father's overcoat. Suspended above the stage is a piano. Tesman and his aunt chatter about domestic trivialities in which Hedda has little interest. At one point, Tesman notices the dust gathering on the old piano and remarks that, if they had the money, he would buy Hedda a new one.

"The frame, the coat, and the piano are all things her father left behind," Preston says. "Not just the objects, but the name Gabler itself. She remains her father's daughter."

By the final scene, Hedda has climbed onto the piano wearing her father's coat. When she raises the pistol, Preston sees the act as more than suicide.

"She kills herself, but she also kills her father, and she kills the child she refuses to acknowledge."

Preston does not excuse Hedda's cruelty. She manipulates, destroys, and deceives. Yet he views her as a tragic hero.

"She does terrible things, and she's deeply contradictory, but society has always judged women differently. Marriage is harder for women. The expectations placed on them are different from those placed on men. I think that's still true today."

The production reinforces those themes through distinctly contemporary theatrical devices. Actors sometimes speak into handheld microphones as if whispering private confessions. At other moments, cameras zoom in on performers and project their faces across the stage. The result is a world of surveillance and manipulation, where power operates through watching and being watched.

The production itself emerged from an unusually immersive process.

Preston spent two months living in Huichang, Jiangxi province, a quiet riverside county that has become increasingly known for its ambitious efforts to establish itself as a center for theater. Actor recruitment began last December, followed by rehearsals and workshops in the spring. The cast and creative team lived together as part of the town's artist residency program.

For Preston, who does not speak Mandarin, the undertaking initially felt risky.

"In a sense, it was a gamble," he says.

However, he struggles to think of another place in the world that offers artists such a concentrated environment for creation, particularly at a time when funding for the arts is shrinking globally.

Each day, he walked along the river that runs beside the theater village.

"Sometimes I'd walk into town, sometimes through the fields, sometimes to a temple. It connected me more deeply to the project. We were in a truly supportive environment, and all the actors were living here together."

Rather than beginning with a fixed interpretation of the text, Preston developed scenes collaboratively with the cast.

"My definition of directing is creating a context in which other people can be creative," he says. "My job is simply to decide what belongs and what doesn't."

Fei Baijun, who plays Judge Brack, describes the process as liberating.

"He encouraged us not to worry about how other actors were performing. 'Just follow your instincts'," Fei says.

The cast reflects the festival's broader blending of professional and local traditions. Among them is a practitioner of Jiangxi's tea-picking opera, who plays Julle, Tesman's aunt. The moment she begins speaking, local audiences recognize her distinctive southern accent. Preston cannot grasp those linguistic nuances himself.

"That's wonderful. The audience immediately understands that she comes from a different world than Hedda. And she's a wonderful performer."

The same cultural layering appears in the costumes. Long Chinese gowns and qipao (traditional dresses) share the stage with Western suits and capes. Preston readily acknowledges one influence: his admiration for the elegance of 1930s Shanghai. But the costumes also serve a social function. Tesman, dressed in traditional attire, embodies continuity and convention; Lovborg, in a Western suit, represents modernity and the future.

Preston resists framing such choices as a contrast between the East and the West.

"I don't think there's that much separation anymore. There have been so many years of mutual influence. Everything is mixed."

That sentiment may also describe Huichang itself. Here, a 19th-century Norwegian drama directed by an American is staged in a rural Chinese county and watched by audiences arriving from Shanghai, Taipei, and San Francisco.

Playwright and director Stan Lai, one of the founders of Huichang Theatre Village, says Hedda Gabler was chosen as the festival's opening production for two reasons: Ibsen remains accessible to broad audiences, and this version of the play was created in Huichang itself.

Lai's connection to the town spans continents. His father was born in Huichang; Lai was born in the United States and raised in Taiwan. He first visited his ancestral hometown in the 1990s after receiving a family letter. Since 2015, he has regularly returned to present work there. In 2024, he and his collaborators formally launched the theater season, which this year features nearly 30 productions and roughly 400 performances.

For many Chinese audiences, Ibsen is still best known for A Doll's House. In 1924, writer Lu Xun delivered his famous lecture "What Happens After Nora Leaves Home?" using Nora's departure to critique the constraints of Chinese society.

Preston sees a similar radicalism in Ibsen.

"Nora doesn't simply leave her house," he says. "She leaves an entire civilization.

"The slam of the door isn't just a woman leaving home. It's Ibsen closing the door on Western civilization."

That capacity to challenge social structures, he believes, explains why Ibsen continues to resonate in China.

Among the works he would most like to introduce to Western audiences is Lu Xun's Diary of a Madman, particularly its recurring image of barking dogs — a metaphor, he says, for a society consuming its own kind.

The connection is not as unlikely as it may seem, but in Huichang, the conversation between Ibsen and Lu Xun continues to find new meanings for audiences from this rural town.