A three-month celebration of contemporary theater has just begun at the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing

Now in its third year, the NCPA International Theater Festival, will feature 10 theater troupes from seven countries staging 56 shows where artists will communicate with audiences after the performances.

Since its debut in 2015, the festival has introduced 24 theater troupes from 9 countries.

"These plays bear distinctive styles influenced by their countries' culture and history.

"Audiences not just enjoy a great show onstage but also get to know a different culture later," says Zhao Fei, one of the curators of the 2017 NCPA International Theater Festival.

The festival comprises two sections - the East and the West - and NCPA's production, Returning Home on a Snowy Night, kicked off the festival on June 1.

Written by playwright Wu Zuguang and directed by Ren Ming, the play set in the late 1920s, tells the tragic love story of a Peking Opera actor, Wei Liansheng, and Yuchun, a concubine of an official.

Meanwhile, two of Japanese theater master Tadashi Suzuki's productions, The Trojan Women and Dionysus, will be staged in the East section over June 22-29. Suzuki, 78, will come to Beijing along with his Suzuki Company of Toga.

The two plays were adapted and directed by Suzuki from the ancient tragedies by Athenian playwright Euripides.

In his production, Suzuki tried to bridge the gap between traditional Japanese Noh and Kabuki and modern theater.

Over August 24 to 27, Li Liuyi, the director and scriptwriter of Beijing People's Art Theatre, will stage his adaptation of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, starring veteran actors Pu Cunxin and Lu Fang.

In the West section, Staatstheater N??rnberg, one of the largest theaters in Germany, will bring two of its productions: Terror, by German writer and lawyer Ferdinand von Schirach, in which the stage is turned into a court and the audience becomes the jury, and The 39 Steps, which was adapted from the 1935 film by Alfred Hitchcock.

Other highlights include British theater company Cheek By Jowl's Twelfth Night, from Aug 11 to 13, and the Deutsches Theater's The Visit (Der Besuch der alten Dame), a three-act play by Swiss playwright Friedrich D??rrenmatt, from July 5 to 8.