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Popular play makes return to the stage

Actors rehearse a scene from The Peach Blossom Land, set in pre-war Shanghai. PHOTO COURTESY OF PERFORMANCE WORKSHOP THEATER

Fifteen years after its conception, Performance Workshop Theater's The Peach Blossom Land is back on the stage and seemingly more relevant than ever.

The work, which debuted in 1986 -- at a time when China and Taiwan were making their first tentative steps towards dialog -- created a sensation for the boldness of its conception as well as its technical excellence.

Performance Workshop Theater and its members have since gone on to further artistic achievements in theater, film and television, but The Peach Blossom Land has continued to grow in stature and has become a classic of Taiwan theater.

In 1991, when the show was taken on tour in the US, Newsweek trumpeted The Peach Blossom Land as "the most recent piece of evidence that Taiwan is creating the boldest Chinese art in Asia today."

The core of the play is a short story by the poet Tao Yuan-ming (AD 365-427) called The Peach Blossom Land -- the Chinese Utopia. This essay is familiar to almost every Chinese child, and many people, regardless of literary pretensions, can quote from it.

Stan Lai, Performance Workshop Theater artistic director. PHOTO: IAN BATHOLOMEW

The story tells of a fisherman who one day travels farther along the river than usual and suddenly finds himself in a land filled with peach blossoms.

Here, people live untroubled by the outside world, ignorant of violence and war, in a idealized pastoral environment.

The fisherman stays with them for some time, then returns back to the outside world.

He is told not to reveal the whereabouts of the peach blossom land, but he ignores this warning, so when he tries to bring people there with him, he is unable to find it again.

The Peach Blossom Land Presented by Performance Workshop Theater Taiwan * Created collectively through improvisational rehearsals led by Stan Lai with ensemble including Lee Li-chun, Chin Shih-chieh and Ding Nai-chu * Performances will be performed at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall from September 9-12 and 16-18, followed by additional performances in Taichung, Chungli, Hsinchu and Kaohsiung in November * Phone for bookings: 2695 2665 * Price: NT$700 * Performances start: 7:30 pm

The Peach Blossom Land contains at least two separate plays -- and possibly three, or more, depending on how much you read into it. In one of the plays, a group of actors seek to present a comic version of Tao's story.

Their rehearsal is disrupted by the presence of another group rehearsing a tragedy.

This second play tells the story of two young lovers who meet in Shanghai in the 1940s but are then separated by war, only to meet again many years later in Taipei.

Echoing the fisherman's longing for the Peach Blossom Land in Tao's classic, the modern play, called Blind Love, tells of the yearning of many Taiwanese for a China that has long disappeared.

The theatrical conventions of Blind Love are those of television melodrama and are in sharp counterpoint to the comedy presented by the other group of actors, which draws heavily on traditional operatic conventions.

In addition to these two plays, there is the interaction between the members of the two groups, who need to divide up stage time so they can both rehearse. Both want the use of the whole stage, and on the one occasion when they are on stage together, the two plays meld in a humorous set piece of mismatched dialog that becomes an apt analogy for current cross-strait dialog.

Behind all the histrionics, the actors get on with their own lives, squabbling with the director and connecting to the very mundane world via mobile phones between acts. One of the outstanding achievements of the play is that the comedy and farce, both crucial to the play's popular appeal, never demean the very real tragedy of displacement and lost love represented in the melodrama Blind Love.

While none of the themes are new, the acceptance of The Peach Blossom Land as a classic of Taiwan's modern theatrical corpus is an indication that perhaps people are now able to see the island's tragic history for what it is -- something not without absurdity and, in any case, belonging to the past, where it should remain.

The language of the play is full of puns and allusions both to modern Taiwanese history and to Tao's classic essay; nevertheless, the quality of the acting makes the play accessible to an international audience.

With the aid of an English synopsis thoughtfully provided in the program, English-speaking audiences will have little difficulty in feeling their way through the complex network of interactions that make up the play.
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