The Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land (暗戀桃花源) was not the Taipei-based Performance Workshop’s (表演工作坊) first production; that honor went to That Night We Performed Crosstalk (那一夜，我們說相聲) in 1985.
Yet despite the company’s and founder Stan Lai’s (賴聲川) multitude of works since then, it is Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land, which premiered in 1986, that they remain most famous for.
The company has revived the play three times in Taiwan (1991, 1999 and 2006) — something previously unheard of in local theatrical circles — turned it into an award-winning film (1992’s The Peach Blossom Land), toured the world with it, including an 80-show run at the Oregon Shakepeare Festival in 2015 and staged the first official version in China in 2006, where it had been famous for years through bootleg DVDs and unauthorized performances.
Photo Courtesy of Performance Workshop
ICONIC CONTEMPORARY THEATER
Yet audiences, especially in the Chinese-speaking world, cannot get enough of the play. It is considered an iconic mainstay of contemporary Chinese theater.
So to mark the play’s 30th anniversary last year, Performance Workshop mounted a new production of the show, which it took to Singapore in February; Kaohsiung, Chungli and Chiayi in April and now moves into the National Theater in Taipei next week for six performances.
Photo Courtesy of Performance Workshop
Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land is about two companies that have accidentally been booked into same space for their dress rehearsals. Each has an opening night in just two days’ time, so neither is willing to concede the stage to the other.
One group needs to rehearse Secret Love, a tragedy about a couple separated by a China’s Civil War, centering on a dying man in Taipei and the woman he left in Shanghai.
Photo Courtesy of Performance Workshop
The other group is doing Peach Blossom Land, a comedy based on a classic Chinese poem about a lost fisherman who lands in a utopia where the people have no memories. However, the fisherman cannot forget his estranged wife, especially because two of the people he meets look just like his wife and her new lover.
As the two groups of players struggle for control of the space, they bicker, critique each other’s shows, steal each other’s props and eventually end up dividing the stage in half and trying to rehearse at the same time.
At its heart, Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land is about love, memories and the people we cannot forget, which is why it continues to strike a chord with so many people.
IMPROVISATION
Lai created the original production through structured improvisation with his cast, and continued to tinker with it in successive shows to keep things challenging. In 1991, that meant inviting movie star Brigitte Lin (林青霞) to make her theatrical debut as the Shanghai love, Yun Zhi-fan, a role she reprised in the film version.
In 1999, it was about inviting a younger generation of actors to step into the leading roles, while for the 20th anniversary production Lai invited the Ming Hwa Yuan Taiwanese Opera Company (明華園) to collaborate.
For this latest version, Lai turned the directing reins over to longtime Performance Workshop stalwart, actress and director Ismene Ting (丁乃箏), who played the role of the errant wife Chun Hua in the Peach Blossom Land between 1991 and 1999.
Ting said Lai had already perfected the play’s entire construct — the script, scenography and music selection — so her main job was “don’t mess it up.”
She chose some Performance Workshop regulars and other actors that she has worked with over the years, including Fan Kuang-yao (樊光耀), and Chu Chung-heng (屈中恆) — who were both so good in Ting’s A Blurry Kind of Love (愛朦朧，人朦朧) in 2015 — Chang Pen-yu (張本渝), Weng Quan-wei (翁銓偉) and Tang Tsung-sheng (唐從聖), who is perhaps better known as Action Tang.
Fan and Jacqueline Zhu (朱芷瑩) play the star-crossed lovers Jiang Bin-iu and Yun Zhi-fan in Secret Love, while Chu plays Master Yuan, Chang is Chun Hua and Tang is Lao Tao in the Peach Blossom Land portion.
The show comes in at just under three hours, including 20-minute intermission.
What was the population of Taiwan when the first Negritos arrived? In 500BC? The 1st century? The 18th? These questions are important, because they can contextualize the number of babies born last month, 6,523, to all the people on Taiwan, indigenous and colonial alike. That figure represents a year on year drop of 3,884 babies, prefiguring total births under 90,000 for the year. It also represents the 26th straight month of deaths exceeding births. Why isn’t this a bigger crisis? Because we don’t experience it. Instead, what we experience is a growing and more diverse population. POPULATION What is Taiwan’s actual population?
For the past five years, Sammy Jou (周祥敏) has climbed Kinmen’s highest peak, Taiwu Mountain (太武山) at 6am before heading to work. In the winter, it’s dark when he sets out but even at this hour, other climbers are already coming down the mountain. All of this is a big change from Jou’s childhood during the Martial Law period, when the military requisitioned the mountain for strategic purposes and most of it was off-limits. Back then, only two mountain trails were open, and they were open only during special occasions, such as for prayers to one’s ancestors during Lunar New Year.
After Jurassic Park premiered in 1993, people began to ask if scientists could really bring long-lost species back from extinction, just like in the hit movie. The idea has triggered “de-extinction” debates in several countries, including Taiwan, where the focus has been on the Formosan clouded leopard (designated after 1917 as Neofelis nebulosa brachyura). National Taiwan Museum’s (NTM) Web site describes the Formosan clouded leopard as “a subspecies endemic to Taiwan…it reaches a body length of 0.6m to 1.2m and tail length of 0.7m to 0.9m and weighs between 15kg and 30kg. It is entirely covered with beautiful cloud-like spots
A key feature of Taiwan’s environmental impact assessments (EIA) is that they seldom stop projects, especially once the project has passed its second stage EIA review (the original Suhua Highway proposal, killed after passing the second stage review, seems to be the lone exception). Mingjian Township (名間鄉) in Nantou County has been the site of rising public anger over the proposed construction of a waste incinerator in an important agricultural area. The township is a key producer of tea (over 40 percent of the island’s production), ginger and turmeric. The incinerator project is currently in its second stage EIA. The incinerator
RSS