October Arroyo 2018

The Garden of Flowing Fragrance
PHOTO: Martha Benedict
NIGHTWALKING
IN THE CHINESE
GARDEN
East meets West in Stan Lai’s
original new play at the
Huntington.
BY SCARLET CHENG
The Huntington’s Chinese Garden, or Liu Fang Yuan (Garden of Flowing
Fragrance), is the atmospheric setting for Nightwalk in the Chinese Garden, a new
play by Stan Lai running through Oct. 26. Festival director of the wildly popular
Wuzhen Theatre Festival staged every October in the picturesque town of Wuzhen,
China, Lai takes on the occasional special project — two years ago he directed The
Dream of the Red Chamber for the San Francisco Opera. That same year the acclaimed
Washington, D.C.–born playwright was commissioned by the CalArts Center for
New Performance and the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical
Gardens to create a new play for the Chinese Garden, which would be staged around
its man-made lake. Audience members would witness scenes as they unfolded in the
various pavilions, terraces and bridges.
“The opportunity to do something like this is very rare,” says Lai, enjoying a moment
of respite between rehearsals on the terrace of the garden tea house, dubbed
Terrace That Invites the Mountains. A soft breeze is blowing across the lake, which
is lined with gnarly Taihu rocks from China, and temperatures are beginning to cool.
“To do a site-specific, immersive project that is real theater, not just an installation or
something, this is a different thing. It’s storytelling that occurs through a garden.”
Each night’s intimate audience of 40 gathers first at the tea house, formally called
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