China’s Pu Songling, the Qing-era master of weird supernatural short fiction, wrote as if the membrane between worlds were tissue-thin … and that tissue was made from ink-brushed paper. Theatre Smith-Gilmour’s spellbinding new production Pu Songling: Strange Tales, playfully directed by Michele Smith at Crow’s Theatre, theatricalizes this conceit. In the show, truth and illusion are folded, creased, and transformed before our eyes by an ensemble of master storytellers at the height of their kinetic craft.
Before the house lights dim, the five actors—Dean Gilmour, John Ng, Diana Tso, Steven Hao, and Madelaine Hodges — enter and chat casually with us. They are curious: how many are familiar with Pu Songling? In my audience, just a couple of hands go up. No matter: they share the briefest background on the 17th-century author of Liaozhai’s Strange Tales, and endorse the bespoke oddity of his stories, before each performer recalls a personal weird favorite. Disarmingly informal, this low-key opening frames our readiness for the uncanny — then, with a tap, the conjuring begins.
Barebones, yet theatrically rich, the staging revolves around a single long wooden table (set and costumes by Ting-Huan Christine Urquhart). Depending on the tale, that table will become anything: a bed, a bier, a room, a mountain. Variously sitting at, on, under, or around it, the ensemble disappears at will into new locations and new roles. They narrate … then, in an instant, morph into nobles, monks, animals, or spirits in conflict. Simple, purposeful lighting by Noah Feaver inflects the scenes and helps to mark transitions. But beyond this, the actors themselves are the ink and the paper: wielding little more than sheets of freighted-feeling paper that flutter as wings or drape as shrouds. their protean bodies manifest these worlds. And their tongues and limbs conjure every sound: the clop of hooves, a sword whisking free, the rush of wind, the wolf’s howl.
A simple knock on the tabletop ends one story and sluices us into the next.
The opener concerns a man (Gilmour) condemned by the King of Hell (Ng) to repeated reincarnation as a horse, then a dog, then a snake. He remembers everything in each incarnation—an “advantage” with consequences. And in the end, does he learn a lesson … or cleverly sidestep learning to move on? I wasn’t quite sure. In the closer, a landowner tricked by foxes wreaks disproportionate revenge, and suffers a still more disproportionate reckoning. He learns – in the grimmest way. I think. The productive uncertainty is clearly a feature, not a bug.
Between these poles, the selected stories lengthen and complexify, zigzagging across fable, horror, comedy, tragedy, and absurdity — freely interfacing with both the supernatural and historical. As promised, they are strange, and in their strangeness, compelling. And like the best anthologies, you simply cannot hold the whole in your head: its contents spill out, leaving brilliant residues: Gilmour as a contorted-visaged, tongue-forward, guttural (yet when prompted, lucid) surgery-performing Judge; Hao as a feral dog, which is simply beyond description; Tso and Hodges in powerfully kinetic, distanced-yet-hand-to-hand combat; Ng as the supercilious and self-righteously deceiving – then deceived – homeowner. The all-in ensemble work is a masterclass in give-and-take-and-make.
From my vantage (white North American male, newly entering Pu Songling’s world), I brought western expectations of thematic closure and neat anthology loops. This show (co-adapted by Smith, Tso, Hao, Hodges, Ng, and Gilmour) refuses that comfort. As scholars of the author note, his foxes and ghosts blur boundaries and smuggle satire. In his work, moral aphorisms coexist with amoral outcomes: bureaucracy shades into Hell … and back. Here, on the Crows stage, these strange tales sometimes end in explicit morals—but more often cut off, tersely, at odd angles. This is a world of predation and transformation. And a world without boundaries that mashes supernatural into natural, profane into sacred, familial into political, and metaphysical into carnal.
In our age of algorithmic narrowcasting, Pu Songling refreshes by inviting us to experience vast, vigorous and variable tracts of overlapping ambiguity. Straight from the 17th century by way of Theatre Smith-Gilmour’s master adapters, these Strange Tales offer the most radical and potentially helpful moral of all: the suggestion that porousness—not purity—is our ultimate survival strategy.
Pu Songling: Strange Tales runs until February 1, 2026 at Crows Theatre. Tickets are available at crowstheatre.com.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
