October Arroyo 2018

–continued from page 11
the Hall of the Jade Camellia, then splits
into two groups to watch various scenes
being performed on the east and west
sides of the lake. Both groups will see the
same scenes, but in a different order.
The inspiration for Nightwalk came
to Lai when he toured this garden three
years ago. He shared his idea with Travis
Preston, dean of the CalArts School of
Theater, who’d wanted to do a project
with him through their Center for New
Stan Lai
Performance. “We’re not really looking
for plays, we’re looking for artists we want
to work with,” Preston says in a phone
interview. “Stan’s a writer and director at the same time. He’s devising the work as he’s
rehearsing it; that’s very consistent with the kind of experimentation we’re interested in.
There’s also a lyricism in Stan’s work I find very moving.”
Lai, who shuttles between Taiwan and China, conducted a workshop in 2016 with
prospective actors and participants at CalArts and the Chinese Garden. His idea was to
weave together two stories: one involving
Henry Huntington, the railroad magnate
whose collections and estate make
up the core of The Huntington, and the
other, the Chinese opera classic The Peony
Pavilion.
The Peony Pavilion is a tragicomedy
written by Tang Xianzu in 1598 — the
original play ran for 55 scenes and took
over 20 hours to perform. (Nightwalk runs
Chenxue Luo of the Shanghai
Kunqu Troupe, performing the role
of the Opera Singer
Hao Feng as The Playwright, a
Chinese man of letters from the
Ming Dynasty
about 90 minutes.) In it a young maiden,
Du Liniang, enters a garden where she
dreams of a handsome scholar, Liu Mengmei,
and tumbles head over heels in love
with him. She falls so deeply that when she awakens, she wastes away pining for him.
Later, this same scholar visits her garden and has a dream about her. In the dream he’s
encouraged to find her grave and exhume her body — which he does, and she miraculously
comes back to life, uncorrupted.
“It’s one of the most famous Chinese plays, but not well known outside of China,”
says Lai in his deep, measured voice. “It’s so steeped in the tradition that I’m very
interested in and write about myself a lot,
which is the reality of dreams, the reality
of art, also my own interest in the creative
process itself — these are the things that
are blending together in the garden here.”
In his play, the playwright becomes part
of the story. “He’s in the midst of writing
The Peony Pavilion,” says Lai, and Du
Liniang becomes his imagined heroine
and muse. “Du Liniang is trying to teach
him how to write.”
The Western part of the story takes
place in the early 1920s, when Henry
Huntington acquires the Thomas Gainsborough
painting, The Blue Boy, today a pride and joy of the Huntington art collection
and the subject of a concurrent exhibition (see page 15). His curator also introduces
him to Chinese opera, via an excerpt from The Peony Pavilion, which is performed in
Nightwalk on a rotating basis by two stars of the Shanghai Kunqu Troupe. After our interview,
Lai invites me to stay for the rehearsal and the kunqu performance. This takes
PHOTO: Top left, courtesy of Stan Lai; bottom left photos by Angel Origgi, courtesy of CalArts Center for New Performance.
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