It's not what typically comes to mind when one thinks of theatre. There are no props, no costumes, no scripts, no special lighting, not even a stage. Just a bare room with a dozen young women sitting on coloured inter-locking rubber mats, telling stories and putting on skits.
Their accents betray them as waidiren, or outsiders, members of the 120 million-plus migrant workers - labourers, waitresses, beauticians, maids, seamstresses and more - who have converged on the mainland's major cities in the hope of finding a better future.
The women, some of whom have travelled by bus or subway for more than an hour to get to the activity, are taking part in a weekly meeting of Hua Dan, an organisation with a lofty goal: to empower migrant women through the power of theatre and creative expression.
Hua Dan is the effort of Caroline Watson, a 27-year-old British woman who first fell in love with drama as a child attending the Kellett School in Hong Kong. Ms Watson continued her interest in theatre in Britain at Lancaster University, where she discovered community and participatory theatre.
While writing her dissertation on theatre in prisons, she realised the potential of drama to effect positive change among individuals and within communities.
It was at university that she also came across the work of Augusto Boal, a Brazilian chemical engineer-turned-director, who in the 1960s pioneered a form of theatre in which the audience could stop the play and suggest different alternatives that the actor would then act out.