Listen to Your Inner Ape, a one-man show, produced by the Drum Tower West Theater in downtown Beijing, has been enthralling thousands of theatergoers and non-theatergoers over the last few months.

Following its premiere on June 30, the show notched up a staggering 9.2 out of 10 on Douban, China's IMDb. The production played two sold-out runs in both July and August, drawing effusive reviews on social media platforms.

Building on its huge success, the production will travel to this year's Wuzhen Theater Festival, a 10-day event from Nov 24 to Dec 4 in East China's Zhejiang province showcasing international theater works and original Chinese dramas.

Adapted from Franz Kafka's 1917 short story, A Report to an Academy, and directed by Xi Wang, the hour-long theater piece stars Li Tengfei, who plays Red Peter, an ape-turned-performer, who has learned to behave like a human, delivering a speech to a scientific academy about how he achieved his transformation.

"Li Tengfei's acting is alarmingly convincing. I couldn't take my eyes off him even for a minute," said Du Xiao, a theatergoer who saw the show on Aug 20.

Sporting lush hair and a wild beard, the actor has a pronounced hunchback that submerges his neck under his shoulders, giving himself the form of a primate.

The moment Red Peter, in a black suit with a red bow tie, arrives on the bare, dim stage, his every movement – from crawling to eyebrows scrunching to handshaking with audience members, portrays a creature trapped between apehood and humanity.

Dragging his right leg, the result of being shot in the hip when he was captured, Red Peter gushes about his anger and anguish of being captured and imprisoned, his epiphany of acquiring human behavior and language to seek a way out, and his disappointment and displacement in the human society.

Red Peter also breaks the fourth wall from time to time by interacting with the audience in a fun manner, such as shaking hands, trying to catch their lice, and asking for cigarettes. Each instance causes the audience to burst into peals of laughter.

Li Tengfei's impressive performance of Red Peter is no easy feat.

A famed and challenging animal role in theater, Kafka's creation, often compared with Frankenstein's monster, has been interpreted many times in theater by acclaimed actors, including British actress Kathryn Hunter (Kafka's Monkey) in 2009, and South African actor Tony Miyambo (Kafka's Ape) in 2015.

With a passion for theater that started in his university years, Li, now 35, quit his job as a design editor with a newspaper in 2014 to pursue acting full time. A self-employed actor for years, Li signed with the Drum Tower West Theater in 2020.

"Over the past eight years I have taken a lot of workshops on acting and acted in various productions but have yet to make a name for myself," Li told the China Daily website.

"I have been trying to make a breakthrough in acting, just like Red Peter trying hard to seek a way out in the human world."

Encouraged by the theater's founder Li Yangduo, Li decided to stage Listen to Your Inner Ape, one of three solo pieces to celebrate the theater's 8th anniversary.

Li then asked his friend Xi Wang, a graduate of the Jaques Lecoq's International Theater School in Paris, to direct him.

"I've known Xi Wang for years and I had been looking forward to working with him. The Jaques Lecoq actor method training that he received in France focuses on physical theater, which is essential in shaping this role," Li said.

Under the director's guidance, Li watched different documentaries on apes to study his subject. The actor also frequented the Beijing Zoo, standing for hours on end in front of the chimpanzee enclosure to observe how they move, eat, and communicate.

"Sometimes I would think chimps and humans differ only by 1.2 percent in DNA, but they live in the zoo since their birth, leading a life that is poles apart from ours," Li mused. "I would often imagine what my life would be like should I live in the zoo."

In the meantime, Xi referred to three Chinese translations of Kafka's short story to work out a script suitable for modern Chinese theatergoers.

After four months of rehearsals, Xi and Li's efforts bore fruit.

Red Peter charmed the Chinese audience and struck a chord with many of them.

The audience roared with laughter when Red Peter shouted to the audience, "Ladies and gentlemen, I learned that one learns when one has to; one learns when one wants a way out. One learns ruthlessly. One supervises oneself with a whip."

Noting the core of Kafka's work is self-domestication, director Xi Wang said this line may especially resonate with Chinese audiences, who, usually out of a need to meet social expectations, study hard, sit the gaokao, and attend a good university to secure a decent job.

Aside from marveling at Li's apt, comical, and emotional performance, audiences were awestruck at the fact that he acted on an empty stage.

"For many Chinese audience members, this theatergoing experience may strike them as strange because theater in China almost always involves a lot of scenery, lighting, and sound effects," the director remarked.

The director and the actor, both influenced by the teachings of late British theater director Peter Brook, agreed to approach this solo piece with minimalism that is advocated by Brook.

Brook authored The Empty Space, a seminal book widely used in higher education of theater studies, and he believed that human beings are richer than the greatest staging effects that exist.

Only aided by a smattering of lighting and music, Li, with his agile movements, transformed the bare stage into Red Peter's home – the African jungle, his cage, his classroom, and his podium.

"We chose to use an empty stage because we believe the script and the actor are the two elements that matter the most in theater," the director said. The history of theater begins in ancient Greece, but theater jobs such as directors, scenic designers, and lighting designers appeared only several hundred years ago, he added.

Listen to Your Inner Ape will tour Suzhou, East China's Jiangsu province, on Oct 1 and Oct 2 at the Suzhou Bay Grand Theater, and its third run will be from Oct 5 to Oct 9 at the Drum Tower West Theater in Beijing.