The theater's fifth anniversary.[Photo provided to China Daily]

Last year nearly 300 performances were staged at Drum Tower West Theatre, attracting about 60,000 theatergoers. Plays the theater has produced also toured the country last year, with more than 60 performances, and attracting about 60,000 theatergoers.

Li Yangduo says that in the first half of this year the theater was going to present two plays, The Pillowman and One Sentence Worth Ten Thousand, adapted from the novel of the same title by Liu Zhenyun, and was going to take them on a nationwide tour, with about 100 shows before June 30.

"All the shows have been canceled because of COVID-19, and we've lost millions of renminbi," Li Yangduo says.

Li Yangduo, born in Heilongjiang province, Northeast China, and in her 40s, studied economic management at university and worked as a statistician for a State-own company in her hometown. But in 1996 she moved to Shenzhen, Guangdong province, and a year later founded an advertising company in Guangzhou. She also became a producer and distributor of television dramas and TV movies.

Her interest in theater began in 2009 when she was introduced to Stan Lai's play The Village, a three and-a-half-hour epic about the Chinese mainland diaspora in Taiwan, her company being involved with publicizing the play in Guangdong.

The following year she moved to Beijing, China's theater mecca, hoping to open her own theater.