Stan Lai's highly anticipated Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land comes to Beijing after 20 years

text by Leon Lee; photos courtesy of Performance Workshop

On stage, two rehearsals are taking place simultaneously. One is Secret Love, in which two young lovers are brought together in Shanghai and then forced to part – a modern tragedy set at the dawn of the Chinese revolution. The other is Peach Blossom Spring, a bawdy period comedy about a sterile fisherman whose cheating wife sends him drifting upstream where he stumbles into Shangri-la. The idea of both plays trying to rehearse onstage at the same time is the premise of Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land, one of the most beloved classics of modern Chinese-language theater, which receives its Chinese mainland premiere this month to celebrate the play’s 20th anniversary.

To say premiere is a bit of a misnomer. Since its Taipei debut in 1986, staged by Taiwan’s Performance Workshop and its playwright-director Stan Lai, the play has actually been performed over 3,000 times on the Chinese mainland. Lai chuckles; “3,000 performances and none of them has been authorized.” The play is requisite study for students of theater and film arts throughout China. Over 80 different scripts exist in Beijing alone – with 27 new versions collected nationally just this past year according to Yuan Hong, a Performance Workshop representative.

Lai cites two inspirations for Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land. While earning his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, Lai studied the Greek dramatic form known as the Satyr play, a comedic drama which would traditionally be performed following a set of three tragedies. He says, “People may consider tragedy and comedy as opposing concepts but I started to see it differently,” that is, as complimentary opposites. After his studies, Lai returned to set up Performance Workshop where, during a dress rehearsal for a colleague’s play, he had a revelatory experience.

In the thick of an avant-garde performance, people suddenly came onto the stage and began to move a piano onstage and hang banners. Infuriated by the disruption, the play’s director burst out in anger, yet banners continued to be hung. Children and their parents started filing into the theater and the play was forced to stop. Lai recalls with a chuckle, “all of a sudden, there was a kindergarten graduation ceremony.” The interruption that led to the absurd juxtaposition onstage provided Lai with a blueprint for this modern masterpiece.

The play within a play structure has a history of successful attempts even prior to Shakespeare, and a play about a play that includes a performance of the play also has a track record in more modern productions such as The Producers. Lai’s Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land is not only two plays within a play, where both are performed in part, but the two plays are seemingly opposing genres: one comedy and the other tragedy. The comedy and tragedy play out separately onstage, interrupt each other and then proceed to compliment each other, creating a seamless whole. Audiences and critics have been saying for the past 20 years that to watch this play is “to know the meaning of crying amidst laughter and laughing between tears.”

Of course, the play’s mass appeal and success is owed not only to experimentalism but also to the stories contained within its avant-garde structure. The young lovers Yun Zhifan and Jiang Binliu in Secret Love endeared themselves to a generation uprooted from the mainland to Taiwan in what was supposed to be a temporary exodus in 1949. The play is tragic and bittersweet, embodying the disappointment of a population, an allegory giving voice to a sensitive and oft unarticulated era of modern Chinese history. On the other hand, Peach Blossom Spring is a rollicking slapstick rendition of Chronicle of Peach Blossom Spring, a prose text by Tao Yuanming about an imagined Shangri-la. Lai’s version of this compulsory school text is infused with the characteristics of the Satyr play: sexual innuendos, drinking, and a double-dose of merrymaking.

Twenty years ago, Performance Workshop debuted the play at the Taipei Art Theatre and it was an instant box office hit. The four official productions in the last 20 years continued to draw sell-out shows and critical praise. In 1991, Hong Kong screen queen Brigitte Lin (Red Dust, The Bride with White Hair, Chungking Express), joined the cast and together they toured the United States and Hong Kong (see sidebar). Lai also committed this production to film, which was captured by cinematographer Christopher Doyle.

For its Beijing performances, English supertitles make the play accessible to non-Chinese audiences. At press time, only scant details about the cast had been announced: For the tragedy Secret Love, one of China’s hottest stage stars Yuan Quan, star of Meng Jinghui’s Amber, will play the part of Yun Zhifan; and popular film actor Huang Lei (Life on a String, Fleeing by Night and Purple Butterfly) plays opposite her as Jiang Binliu.

The production will have two runs for a total of 27 performances in Beijing alone, almost double the number of shows of any recent theater run in the capital. But risking an audience less than a full house does not bother Lai. When the play first premiered in 1986, it seemed unlikely that it could sustain its packed audiences, yet its popularity continued to earn strong box office receipts in Taipei, and today it is still cherished, loved and well-attended by Chinese-language audiences worldwide. Lai believes that the play has proven itself. “Even though I am the playwright and director, “ Lai says, “this play is larger than I am.”

Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land plays at Capital Theater, November 18-26 and continues at the PLA Theater in December. All performances are in Mandarin Chinese with English supertitles.