Bra

This is a play for the failed: failed love, failed careers, failed lives.

In a perfectly ordinary Shanghai apartment, a young married couple share a home—and nothing else. Xiao Jingcheng, a PhD from a top university, hasn’t worked in three years. For the past year, he hasn’t even stepped outside. He lives off his wife, Lin Wanting. This afternoon, the wife who has been holding everything together finally breaks.

People call the man “trash,” and they sympathize with the woman who cheats. Two lovers on the city’s margins try to save each other—only for it to end, inevitably, as a joke. When everyday life is laid out in full, what lies underneath is a lover’s soul in pieces.

Onstage, trash becomes the concrete embodiment of all this: it builds the space of living and generates its own language, leaving everything discarded—objects, dignity, intimacy—with nowhere to hide. Elastic bands stretch across the stage to outline a rigid “box” in space—an externalised frame that traps the husband inside an invisible definition—while also binding the couple together: the more one pulls away, the tighter the restraint. The bands function as both scenography and a physical score, driving sequences of tension, recoil, dragging, and collapse.

A mobile figure moves in and out of this structure, shifting roles: the husband’s double, a delivery rider, and an outside observer. This character widens the world beyond the apartment while keeping the couple under constant watch.

Core Team
Director: Mirror Huang Jingxuan
Playwright: Chen Xialu
Cast: Fang Wenyue · Sun Cheng · Shi Wenxiang

Design
Set: Bai Lena
Music (Live): Wang Yingjie
Lighting: Ma Weigang
Costume & Makeup: Li Ling

Production
Producer: Fang Danjie
Production Manager: Wang Xueke
Stage Manager: Zhu Jiaqi
Publicity Coordination: Qi Xuehui