12:30 pm Monday April 9, 2007, 102 Kern

Film Screenings: Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land

7 pm, Tuesday April 3, 22 Deike
7 pm, Wednesday April 4, 135 Reber

Video: Footage from the English version performed at Stanford

Stan Lai (Lai Sheng-chuan)

“Stan Lai is Asia’s Top Director.” -- Asiaweek

Leon Sloss Jr. Visiting Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University

Ph.D. in Dramatic Art, U.C. Berkeley, 1983

One of the most influential playwrights and directors active in the U.S. and Asia, Stan Lai was born in Washington, D.C. in 1954 and educated in America and Taiwan. His works have drawn comparisons to the works of Tony Kushner, Robert Lepage, and Peter Brook.

Lai’s plays (27 original works to date) have been performed throughout the Chinese world, and he is widely regarded as one of the most important voices in contemporary Chinese-language theatre.

He has received Taiwan’s highest award for the arts, the National Arts Award, an unprecedented two times (1988, 2001). His innovative book Stan Lai on Creativity (Lai Sheng-chuan de chuanyixue, 2006) is a best seller in China. Stan Lai’s plays have revived Taiwan’s theatre, toured internationally, and influenced a generation of theatre artists. The Far Eastern Economic Review describes his work as "the most exciting theatre in the Chinese-speaking world"; Newsweek calls it "the most recent piece of evidence that Taiwan is creating the boldest Chinese art in Asia today."

Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land

Lai’s most famous work Secret Love In Peach Blossom Land (1986) has toured worldwide, been made into an award-winning film (1992), and has had hundreds of unauthorized productions in China. Of its recent Beijing production directed by Lai, the New York Times says that “by the end…the audience is left to contemplate the burdens of memory, history, longing, love and the power of theater itself.”

Two theatre groups are mistakenly booked into the same theatre for rehearsal. One is performing Secret Love, a serious contemporary drama; the other is performing the farce In Peach Blossom Land.

The two groups fight for the stage, and eventually resign to sharing it. In between, madness ensues, and a mysterious woman roams about the theater searching for a man who may or may not exist.

This is a metatheatrical collage, a structured chaos, a meeting point of competing visions of the Chinese diaspora, tragedy, and rollicking comedy.