Susan Su thought she was discovering a new café. She was in Beijing for the second half of her gap year, working with a biomedical engineering group at Tsinghua University. But the lab was relatively new, and she was filling her time by exploring the city. She soon realized she had instead stumbled into the first nonprofit, independently owned theater in China, which supplemented its income with a café. Productions had been halted and staff had left due the Covid-19 pandemic, yet the place still had an atmosphere that intrigued…
