MCLC: A Dream Like a Dream

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Sebastian Veg <sveg at cefc.com.hk>
Subject: A Dream Like a Dream review
***********************************************************

Source: NY Review of Books (9/26/13):
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/sep/26/on-stage-near-shanghai
/

On Stage Near Shanghai
By Robert Brustein 

Last May, my wife and I traveled to China in order to spend two weeks at
the international Wuzhen Theatre Festival. I had previously been appointed
honorary chairman of the event, which also included among its
presentations the final play in my Shakespeare trilogy. 2013 is the
festival’s inaugural year, and for the purpose a philanthropic businessman
with advanced architectural tastes named Chen Xianghong had funded a
1,200-seat glass and filigree theater called the Grand, as well as
subsidizing the renovation of four additional facilities. Although Chen is
a former Communist official, there was little government presence in the
project apart from its stamp of approval.

Wuzhen is a picturesque theme park near Shanghai on a Venice-like canal,
which draws about six million tourists a year. It has lively storefronts
that display such ancient Chinese practices as silk-work weaving and
foot-binding. It also boasts very clean air and a number of elegant
four-star hotels with luxurious accommodations and immaculate service. In
these places you cannot drop a pea pod or a crumb of bread without it
instantly being whisked up by a vigilant domestic and deposited in a
plastic bag.

If this oasis sounds different from the China we’ve been hearing about in
the media, with its contaminated chickens, floating pigs, poisoned air,
corruption, cyberespionage, abuse of the human rights of political
dissidents, inhumane prison treatment, and, most recently, rural
relocation, well it is. The festival leaders were obviously more
interested in displaying a different face to the world, particularly their
pride in Chinese theater artists and their curiosity about American and
European cultures. And while virtually nobody in our group knew a word of
Chinese besides “Thank you” and “Hello,” a lot of the Chinese visitors
spoke flawless English. True, the local plays we saw were hardly activist.
The only political criticism I heard was at least half a century old,
directed against the Japanese in World War II and Mao’s Cultural
Revolution in the 1960s.

Anticipating the officially warming political relations between the newly
elected Chinese president, Xi Jinping, and President Obama, the festival’s
Chinese leaders displayed friendship, cooperation, and courtesy toward us
visiting Westerners. (There was also an almost desperate eagerness on the
part of young people to get photographs of us on their iPhones, preferably
with our arms around their shoulders.)

Wuzhen has ambitions to become a major international theatrical event like
Avignon or Edinburgh, and, judging from its first season, it will almost
certainly realize them. The initial program featured a mix of six
productions equally divided between East and West, plus panels, street
mimes, carnivals, and lively student competitions. Coming from Europe was
Inside the Skeleton of the Whale, a piece conceived by the Grotowski
disciple Eugenio Barba and his Danish Odin Teatret company. Invited from
the United States were David Henry Hwang’s The Dance and the Railroad from
the Signature Theatre, and my own The Last Will from the Abingdon Theatre.
Coming from China were three productions, the most significant (and
surprisingly most experimental) works of the festival.*

One was a crime story set to a rock score called Murder of Hanging Garden
and directed by the avant-garde artist Meng Jinghui. Another was The
Yellow Storm, centering on the Japanese invasion of Beijing in 1937,
adapted, staged, and designed by the auteur Tian Qinxin; her Green Snake
will be produced at the Kennedy Center in March 2014.

But the most awe-inspiring Asian entry was A Dream Like a Dream, an
eight-hour epic by the extraordinary theater artist (and festival artistic
director) Stan Lai, also known as Lai Sheng-chuan, whom the BBC has called
“probably the best Chinese language director and playwright in the world.”

In turn, A Dream Like a Dream, which Lai has been working on since 2000,
has been hailed by the leading Chinese critic, Raymond Zhou, as not only
Lai’s finest play, but as “a major milestone in Chinese theater, possibly
the greatest Chinese-language play since time immemorial.” I don’t have
enough scholarship to confirm this seemingly extravagant judgment. But it
may seem less exaggerated when you consider that Chinese playwriting is a
relatively new phenomenon. (Until the early part of the twentieth century,
theater in China was mostly composed of Beijing and Cantonese opera and
shadow puppetry.)

Still, such hyperbolic praise is impressive from a Chinese critic,
especially since Lai, who has written over thirty full-length plays, is
not Chinese but Taiwanese. He was born and raised, in fact, in the United
States up to the age of twelve, when his father was serving as a diplomat
in Washington. (Lai later returned to the US with his wife Ding Nai-chu to
earn a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley.) And as if to confirm the intercontinental
reach of Lai’s writing, the first workshop of his latest play was actually
done in 2000 at Berkeley, and in English.

Clearly, the tensions between Taiwan and China have been relaxed. Lai’s
work travels freely between the two countries and cultures. Before A Dream
Like a Dream, the most celebrated theater piece by this playwright was
Secret Love for the Peach Blossom Spring (1986), which his wife produced
six years later as a movie in Taiwan. Secret Love is a Pirandello-like
double play that combines written text with actors’ rehearsals and
improvisations for the purpose of breaking down the barriers between stage
and reality. It displays an unusual capacity to meld the past and the
present, both in story and technique, so that medieval history is being
dramatized side by side with a contemporary plot.

A Dream Like a Dream was partially created by Lai’s repertory company, the
Performance Workshop, out of “crosstalk” (orxiangsheng, the Chinese word
for standup comedy). The playwright provides the outline; the actors
extemporize on it; then the playwright edits the results. America, of
course, has a strong tradition of improvised standup, from Lenny Bruce to
Lewis Black to Louis C.K. Less impressive is the improvisational technique
encouraged, say, by the Method School, where actors often explore their
own personalities instead of the ones they are being paid to play.

By contrast, Chinese performers have a kind of humility not often seen in
our celebrity culture, though one can see simulations in Academy and Tony
Award acceptance speeches. Huang Lei, the founding director of the
festival and the man who first conceived it, though a wildly popular film
and TV star in China, not only sought a relatively small part in one of
the festival plays, but manages a bar in Wuzhen that you reach by walking
through his home. Imagine visiting Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Shazi on
Main,” in Santa Monica, by schlepping through his kitchen.

Later, I learned that the leading gray-haired old lady in Stan Lai’s play
was actually a well-known (and ravishingly beautiful) youngish movie star.
Western celebrities equally willing to submerge their egos in a character
part are rarer—Meryl Streep comes immediately to mind (most recently
transforming herself into Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady) and in
recent years Charlize Theron and Nicole Kidman have improved their
reputations as serious actors by precisely such transformations. But this
kind of self-effacement is almost a trademark in Chinese theater.

As the title of A Dream Like a Dream suggests, the play belongs to a
subcategory of plays that perhaps began with Shakespeare’sA Midsummer’s
Night’s Dream, before being developed by Pedro Calderón de la Barca in
Life Is a Dream and August Strindberg in A Dream Play (and then
systematized in the contemporary theatrical form known as Expressionism).
Lai’s dream play has its religious roots in Buddhism, and its breakdown of
time and space creates a kind of fractured reality that embodies the
spirit of Zen. In his excellent article about the festival published on
Salon.com <http://Salon.com/>, the critic Jonathan Kalb accurately
describes the play as “structured like a series of nested Chinese boxes:
stories and dreams within other stories and dreams….”

The best Western theater pieces I know to match the eight-hour length of A
Dream Like a Dream are the Royal Shakespeare Company’s
eight-and-a-half-hour Nicholas Nickleby, Peter Brook’s nine-hour
Mahabharata, Tony Kushner’s three-play Angels in America, and KA MOUNTain
and GUARDenia Terrace, Robert Wilson’s week-long marathon atop a mountain
in Iran. The duration of Lai’s play can be explained not only by the fact
that it covers almost seventy years of human history, beginning in 1933
and ending in the year of the millennium. It also follows the life
experiences of at least three principal characters, played by two or three
actors each, so that a character not only moves through time by aging but
also through space by appearing in two places, simultaneously.

All three characters are sick, and all three are preparing to die. Dying
(along with traveling) is, in fact, the central metaphor of the play,
which, moving through the decades, takes extinction and regeneration to be
its ultimate destinations. The audience is arranged on swivel seats,
around which the thirty-two actors parade clockwise, sometimes carrying
briefcases, at varying speeds on specially constructed ramps above their
heads, while the settings change frequently to accommodate the multiple
scenes. The result is a sense of accelerated hustle, rather like being in
Grand Central Station while several trains are taking on passengers at the
same time.

The dream-death metaphor is established in the very first moment with an
account of the fictional pre-Han dynasty poet Zhuang Heng, an invention of
the playwright, being imprisoned by a Chinese emperor. (Like Mao during
the Cultural Revolution, he is preparing to imprison or exterminate
scholars and artists in order to revise history.) Zhuang escapes this fate
by imagining a magnificent world for himself near a lake that he fully
enters on the day of his execution. He leaves behind a poem called “Ode
Like a Dream” with the following verse: “This floating life is like a
dream/But if a dream is not a dream, What then is this floating life?/A
dream like a dream.”

Echoing not only the name of his play but that of Calderon’s, Stan Lai
then proceeds to embroider his own dream. For the purpose, he has woven
together three other dream stories, each revolving around a diseased, or
potentially diseased, individual. The first features a female character
named Doctor A (who is, as she gets older, played by another actor who
also plays Doctor B). She is depressed by the callousness and cynicism of
her profession and by the death of her patients until she meets Patient
#5A (who is played by an actor who plays Patient #5B as well), who is
being treated for an undiagnosed disease. In effect, two different actors
play different phases of the same character while also playing a different
character. Later, we follow Patient #5A to Paris, where he becomes
involved with a Chinese waitress, and where he then encounters a
mysterious old lady named Koo, with whom he acts out the third story.

The second story is about the life journey of a younger Koo (played by yet
another ravishing actress), once a desirable prostitute in a brothel,
pursued by many men. Among these is a lovesick French consul, the
aristocratic Henri. After divorcing his wife Henri marries Koo and takes
her first to Paris, then to his château in Normandy, a haunting place
where, it is said, you can sometimes see your own image in a lake, like
the poet Zhuang at the beginning of the play. After getting erotically
involved with a number of avant-garde artists (including a zany Surrealist
named Salvador!), Koo herself begins to paint.

Count Henri seems to regard her extramarital affairs with chilly
forbearance, until one day he leaves Paris on a train and never returns.
Koo believes him to be dead, since the train has blown up leaving the
station, and no further trace of him remains other than his suitcase. When
she goes to withdraw some cash from the bank, Koo discovers that Henri has
already closed the account, and all of her paintings in the safe deposit
box have disappeared, except for one of herself and the count on the wall
of their now foreclosed Normandy estate.

Many years later, Henri reappears, as the husband of a rich African woman
for whom Koo is working as a maid. Paralyzed by surprise, she leaves the
house without confronting her former husband. But the revenge she later
takes is worth the wait.

The third story centers on Koo as an old lady, now confined to a
wheelchair and being tended by Patient #5A. In this story the various
strands of the play are interwoven like the fabric of a multicolored
nomadic tapestry, before achieving their pattern of unity.

Although somewhat marred toward the end by some uncharacteristically
homiletic passages, A Dream Like a Dream is, I believe, the masterpiece
critics claim it to be. And the scope and ambition of the play suggest a
genuine resurgence in Chinese-language drama and audience appetite for it,
just as our own is flagging and drooping. It is a rare event on Broadway
when a popular nonmusical play tests your concentration for eight hours
instead of the customary two. Imagine an audience that responds to the
most experimental work with teenage squeals usually reserved for rock
stars. Imagine tickets to an experimental avant-garde exercise being
scalped for over $1,000, even more than house seats to The Book of Mormon!
Imagine thirty-two actors on an American stage today for any presentation
other than a blockbuster musical comedy. And speaking of that genre, Stan
Lai is now writing the book for a Broadway musical based on the martial
arts expert Bruce Lee—it will be interesting to see how well the
commercial American stage and the Chinese experimental theater cultures
intersect.

This season in New York, in addition to the usual musicals, we have had a
one-man Macbeth and a one-woman Medea, an off-Broadway menu limited to
three actors per play, and a Broadway audience composed almost entirely of
out-of-town tourists and corporate executives wooing potential buyers on
an expense account. Some of this disparity can be attributed to the fact
that China’s huge population (1.35 billion) is almost four times the size
of our own. But it is also doubtless due to the unchecked energy that is
bubbling out of this fascinating and contradictory country. China’s
audience is young; ours is superannuated. China looks to the unknown
future while we replay our familiar past. Maybe Chinese culture can help
teach us something about how to rejuvenate a faltering, doddering,
senescent theater and restore it to life. A Dream Like a Dream, along with
other productions coming from China, could very well revive our faith in
the belief that art and the imagination have considerably more power than
capitalism or communism to elevate our spirits and improve our lives.

1. *And this capacity for bold experiment is not limited to the theater.
The Great Chinese State Circus has produced a jaw-dropping version of Swan
Lake that combines traditional ballet with astonishing gymnastics. You can
see some scenes from this on YouTube.
<http://www.nybooks.com.eproxy1.lib.hku.hk/articles/archives/2013/sep/26/on
-stage-near-shanghai/?pagination=false&printpage=true#fnr-*>