“The audiences here are incredible,” Mr. Robbins said, “so much warmer than in the States.” He said that, before arriving in China, he was anxious about whether the comedic elements would translate, but it appeared that they did.

The show was one of 10 performances that the Actors’ Gang put on this month as part of a two-city, two-week visit to China. While the ensemble had toured internationally before, this was the first time it had performed in mainland China and the first time it had brought “Midsummer” to audiences abroad. For each of its six performances in Beijing and four at the 1,200-seat DaGuan Theater in Shanghai, tickets were sold out in advance.

While the appetite for theater, including Western-style spoken drama, as it is known in Chinese, has been growing, particularly among the young, the rise in foreign productions is a relatively recent phenomenon. The Actors’ Gang “Midsummer” is only the second production by an American company to be shown at the National Center for the Performing Arts, one of the top performing halls in China since it opened in 2007. (The first was an L.A. Theater Works’ “Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers” last year.) As a result, in a country where theater has traditionally been dominated by forms like Chinese opera, with its ornate costumes and heavily stylized movements, and where most people are familiar with the name Shakespeare but few have studied his plays, the bare-bones production of “Midsummer” is still something of a novelty.

“People have been very curious in the beginning of the show, because, instead of hiding anything, everything is present onstage,” Mr. Robbins said. “They aren’t really used to that.”

Alison M. Friedman, the founder of Ping Pong Productions, a Beijing-based cultural-exchange production company, thought to bring the Actors’ Gang to China after seeing “Midsummer” in Los Angeles last year.