One Day Three Autumns is the kind of play that's about jokes and telling jokes, but you walk out of the theater with your eyes moist, or the trace of tears on your face.

Adapted from Liu Zhenyun's 2021 book Laughter and Tears: A Novel, it won Play of the Year honor in a year-ending list released on Jan 17 by Southern Weekly, a Guangdong-based magazine, to encourage cultural creation.

Started in 2008, the list also includes the film and book of the year.

"The play elaborates on the novel's themes of solitude, searching, and self-redemption, and presents a picture of life that is realistic and magical, humorous and absurd, symbolic and philosophical," the award panel said.

"Theater has its magic, for it's only in the theater that you can see the protagonist on stage as a boy, a teenager and an old man," Liu told the audience after the first performance at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing on Dec 11.

Joke-telling plays a central role in the narrative. It is a tradition in Yanjin, Liu's hometown in Henan province, a recurring motif in his works, suggesting that humor can rescue individuals from the curse of a "joke" fairy.

Together with One Sentence Worth Ten Thousand, a play based on the novel Someone to Talk To and I Am Not Madame Bovary, which is based on I Didn't Kill My Husband, the three plays, collectively known as the "Liu Zhenyun theater trilogy", examine the changes to China's historical and contemporary social context, according to the award panel. It added that as the plays have been adapted into multiple languages, they also offer insight for understanding of the country abroad.