A young woman auditions to play Mulan, the girl who went to war in her father’s place, and finds her way back to the father who no longer remembers her.

The first full-scale production of the Department of Puppetry at The Central Academy of Drama, staged with shadow puppets, rod and bunraku-style puppets, masks, large creature rigs and projection.

In a frozen city in northern China, neighbors live stacked in identical concrete apartment blocks, each shut inside a room and a life of their own. A teenage couple plans to run away. A newlywed couple’s wedding night is hijacked by a broken washing machine. A shut-in man suspects he may already be dead. Then the first big snow in years buries the cars, and for one morning the neighbors gather in the courtyard and talk about what they dreamed last night. By eight o’clock, the cars pull out one by one, and everything goes back to normal.

Told in seven scenes, the play is staged with rolling wooden frames on carts, a washing machine, an old TV, and an iron grid that slowly lowers over the stage until it rests on the floor.

A boy gives away his own head, a stranger takes his revenge, and three heads end up buried together, because no one can tell which one was the king’s.

The whole play runs on five movable pieces of scenery: every head on stage is a mask, and the fight inside the cauldron is only shadows on a scrim.