RHINOCEROS
IN LOVE
恋爱的犀牛

In March 2019, Yu Theatre Society presented its very first production—Liao Yimei’s Rhinoceros in Love. After five months of rehearsals and preparations, the play ran for five sold-out performances at the Isabel Bader Centre Studio Theatre. As the first non-English language play ever staged at Queen’s University, the production featured projected English surtitles, allowing audiences to transcend linguistic barriers. The show not only went popular on campus but also attracted wide attention from local Kingston media, including Kingston Global News, Queen’s Journal, and Queen’s Alumni Review, and even appeared on the homepage of Queen’s University’s official website.

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In a WeChat article published on July 1, 2019, we wrote:

“This is where we began: from an idea unwilling to settle for mediocrity, to a group of colleagues unafraid of challenges, to performances that astonished audiences again and again. On stage, we never wished to simply be answerers—we wanted to be the ones who asked the questions.”

 

This achievement was not only a theatrical success but also an exploration of cross-cultural communication. Through translation and surtitles, we invited speakers of two languages into the same theatrical space for the first time—whether as audiences or as members of the creative team. The company brought together students from diverse backgrounds: drama majors, international students, second-generation Chinese immigrants, and even local English speakers. This bold experiment soon found its way into the classroom, becoming a case study in the Department of Drama. Members who once struggled to find opportunities amid linguistic and cultural barriers discovered their own stage through Yu Theatre.