THE BELLS

World Premiere By Theresa Rebeck

McCarter Theatre, Princeton, NJ

Emily Mann, Dir.

About the Play:

Theresa Rebeck’s expressionistic melodrama set in the waning years of the Alaskan Gold Rush tracks the intertwined fates of a gregarious innkeeper, Mathias; his rebellious daughter, Annette; and the misfits of a boomtown gone bust. Hard luck and hunger have brought them together, but when a stranger begins asking questions about the mysterious disappearance of a Chinese prospector, Xiufei, he soon learns that it’s every man for himself in this vast, white wilderness, where nothing is quite what it seems, and ghost stories are never taken lightly. (taken from Samuel French).

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Reviews:

“ A stoic portrait by Pun Bandhu of a doomed Chinese miner who

drops in from time to time with his ‘sorrowful friends of cold

and rain; forceful and vividly defined.”

Robert L. Daniels, Variety

“The outstanding cast creates memorable portraits. A

fervent Pun Bandhu is the Chinese prospector who

disappeared 18 years earlier after striking a winning claim

and who now haunts the proceedings.”

Naomi Siegel, The New York Times

“Pun Bandhu’s XuiFei is appropriately solid and stolid and shows [his] warm side when, in the remembered past, he gifts Annette

with two bells.”

Bob Rendell, TalkinBroadway.com

“The actors — whom Emily Mann directs with zest — wholeheartedly mine the material for whatever character gold lies thar.

Bandhu haunts the stage with the right kind of gravity. “

David Finkle, Theatremania.com

“A ghostly figure appears and laments, “I don’t want to die here. I want to die in my home.” XuiFei (Pun Bandhu) is a tormented

ghost, a Chinese prospector. His spirit has been unable to leave the scene of his murder around 1899. Credit goes to Bandhu 

for haunting the proceedings with a degree of poignancy, as he reflects soulfully of his quest to find enough gold to buy

his girl friend’s freedom from a house of prostitution.”

Simon Saltzman, TheatreScene.net