The Peony Pavilion—Young Lovers’ Edition

Time&Date:19:30:00 5-10/8/2008
Venue:Meilanfang Grand Theater

Price(RMB):50,100,150,200,280,680,880,1280

The Peony Pavilion—Young Lovers’ Edition
Five years ago UNESCO proclaimed Kun Opera (also known as Kunqu, pronounced “kwun chyu”) a "Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity."
 It is ironic that when UNESCO made its proclamation Kun Opera was on the brink of extinction. All of its masters were over sixty years of age, and the few schools that taught Kun Opera attracted a meager number of students. But in the years since then, Kun Opera has enjoyed a renaissance. It is now performed professionally in seven cities on the Chinese mainland (Beijing, Shanghai, Suzhou, Nanjing, Changsha, Wenzhou, and Hangzhou), as well as in Taipei, Hong Kong and Macau.
The main vehicle for the revival of Kun Opera has been the sixteenth-century Ming dynasty classic by Tang Xianzu (1550-1616),

The Traditional Version
Writer: Tang Xianzu of Ming Dynasty
Acts: 55
Story:
In the Song Dynasty, there lived a girl from a rich family named Du Liniang in Nan’an City. One day, she goes to the garden to have some fun. She is mesmerized by the unsurpassed spring scenery and ravished by an intoxicating dream, in which a handsome scholar (Liu Mengmei) comes to her with a willow branch and they fall in love at first sight.
Waking from the dream, she finds no way to part with his image in her heart and it seems impossible for her to lock up her heart that has just been freed from the bondage of feudal ethics. She is so enchanted by the feeling that she can find herself going nowhere else except in the dream where she stays with Liu Mengmei.
As a result, she gets lost in the smothering atmosphere of her family where she can not follow her heart to choose her ideal spouse. She suffers so much in missing him that she is doomed to fall ill and then return to dust. As she lies dying, she instructs her maid Chunxiang to bury her beside the plum tree in the garden of her family and to bury her portrait under a stone from Tai Lake.
Liu Mengmei seems to be directed by this invisible power and he passes through Lin’an on his way to take an examination. He falls ill in Lin’an and stays in the Plum Blossom Temple that Du Liniang’s father has built beside her grave.
Liu finds Du Liniang’s portrait there and he falls in love with her at first sight, even though what he is looking at is just a portrait. What’s more, he speaks to her portrait every day and Du Liniang is moved by him again. In his rendezvous with Du’s spirit, the fact that she has died is revealed by, and he follows what Du instructs him to do: to unearth her corpse. Upon doing so, Du Liniang is revived by the power of their deep love. Eventually, as we suspect and hope, they are united and get married.
The rebirth of Kunqu owes much to artists who have painstakingly revived the art, in many cases reinterpreting it for modern audiences. In 1998, U.S. director (and member of the faculty at UCLA) Peter Sellars mounted an experimental, avant-garde, boundary-crossing version of Peony Pavilion that debuted in Vienna and then toured widely. This version was in English (although the text was faithful to the original); the music, by composer Tan Dun, however, was entirely new. (A soundtrack, under the name of Bitter Love, is available from Sony Records. The Sellars production used TV monitors on stage and portrayed the lead characters as American teenagers.
In 1999 Chinese-born director Chen Shizheng produced a complete, 20-hour, 55-act version, commissioned by the Lincoln Center Festival, which premiered in New York, and then toured to Caen, Paris, Milan, Perth, Aarhus, Vienna, and Berlin. This was perhaps the first full-length staging in three hundred years.

The Modern Version
No one has been more indefatigable, nor more influential, in reviving the art of Kun Opera than Kenneth Pai (Pai Hsien-yung / Bai Xianyong), a renowned Chinese-born Taiwanese author and emeritus professor of Chinese literature at UC Santa Barbara. Pai says he fell in love with Kun Opera at an early age. Decades ago he participated in two productions of Peony Pavilion: in 1983, when two scenes of the opera were staged; and in 1992, when he took Hua Wenyi, formerly of the Shanghai Kun Opera Troupe and now residing in the Los Angeles area, to Taiwan, to star in a two-and-a-half-hour production. Both of these were abridged versions, and in Pai’s view, unavoidably lacked the comprehensiveness and cohesion essential to capturing the full majesty of the Ming dynasty original script. Thus, Pai undertook to create an adaptation that is not only cohesive but is suited to modern tastes and yet remains faithful to the original, including all the traditional performance practices of Kun Opera.
In 2003, Pai spent five months editing the original script by Tang Xianzu and created a 125-aria, 27 scene program to be performed over nine hours in three performances. (The original Tang Xianzu version was nothing less than a marathon, involving 403 arias, 55 acts, and 20 hours of performance.) Pai calls his version the “Young Lovers’ Edition,” for it concentrates on the play’s story of love between sixteen-year-old Liniang and twenty-year-old Mengmei. The description “Young Lovers’ Edition” is also fitting for two other reasons. First, the main audience Pai wanted to reach was university students, for it is primarily on their shoulders that will fall the task of understanding, interpreting, and preserving humanity’s cultural legacy. Second, the performers are all young people. To groom them for performing at the most exacting and highest levels, Pai gathered together Kun Opera scholars and retired performers from the "three shores" (mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong) and began a rigorous program of training at the Suzhou Kun Opera Company.
Pai explains that the two young lead performers (Yu Jiulin as Mengmei, and Shen Fengying as Liniang) were chosen for their "jade-like appearance, voices, posture, and acting." He adds that traditionally the lead performers were middle-aged veterans of countless performances, straining the imagination of the audience. Pai chose to break with this theatrical tradition in order to "give new life to the art form, to cultivate a new generation of Kun Opera aficionados, and to offer respect to playwright Tang and all the master artists that came before. Kun Opera must continually be youthful in its performance, presentation, and legacy."
Under the guidance of two venerable masters of the Kun Opera operatic form -- Wang Shiyu and Zhang Jiqing -- the young performers were put through a year of rigorous training and rehearsing, coming on top of four years of prior training and performance. Each and every detail of the art direction, costumes, musicians, props, and stage were mulled over by Pai's team to ensure that this Peony Pavilion displays the full splendor of the original.
Performances of the Young Lovers’ Edition of Peony Pavilion began in the National Theater in Taipei on April 29, 2004, and have continued since then to be staged all across China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. And now Kenneth Pai and the Suzhou Kunqu Opera Company bring this magnificent production to audiences in California.

The Writer and Producer of the Modern Peony Pavilion
Kenneth Pai (Pai Hsien-yung / Bai Xianyong) has been described as a "melancholy pioneer." He was born in Guilin, Guangxi, China at the cusp of both the Second Sino-Japanese War and subsequent Chinese Civil War. Pai's father was the famous Kuomintang (KMT) general Pai Chung-hsi, whom he later described as a "stern, Confucian father" with "some soft spots in his heart." He was diagnosed with tuberculosis at the age of seven, and during which time he lived separately from his siblings (of which he would have a total of nine). He lived with his family in Chongqing, Shanghai, and Nanjing before moving to Hong Kong in 1948 and Taiwan in 1952.
Pai went abroad in 1963 to study literary theory and creative writing at the University of Iowa. That same year, Pai's mother, the parent with whom Pai had the closest relationship, died, and it was this death to which Pai attributes the melancholy that pervades his work. After earning his M.A. from Iowa, he became a professor of Chinese literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has resided in Santa Barbara ever since. Pai retired from UCSB in 1994.
Crystal Boys (1983; English translation, San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1990), tells the story of a group of homosexual youths living in 1960s Taipei largely from the viewpoint of a young, gay runaway. Other famous works include Fallen Immortals (1967); Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream (1968; English translation, Indiana Univ. Press, 1982); Taipei People (1971; Chinese-English bilingual edition, Chinese Univ. of Hong Kong, 2000); and Lonely Seventeen (1976). Bai’s works have been translated into English, French, Korean, Japanese, German, and other languages.
A higher proportion of Pai's work has been turned into films, TV or stage plays than almost any other contemporary Taiwanese writer. Stories works as Jade Love, The Last Night of Taipan Chin, Crystal Boys, and Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream are recognized classics of Chinese-language fiction.
Regardless of whether he was writing creative works in Taiwan or teaching Chinese literature at UC Santa Barbara, Pai’s love affair with Kun opera has never weakened. He was involved in two prior productions of Peony Pavilion, in 1983 and 1992, but those were abridged versions of the original opera. For this version, he took on the task of creating an adaptation that is suited to modern tastes and yet remains faithful to the original opera, including all the traditional performance practices of kun opera.

Lead Performers
Yu Jiulin (as Liu Mengmei)
Yu Jiulin was trained in the jinsheng (young scholar) roles at the Suzhou Kun Opera Theater of Jiangsu Province. A talented, young artist, he was coached by the famous Kunqu artists. Wang Shiyu and Shi Xiaomei. He won the Performance Award at the first Kunqu Arts Festival in China, and the Gold Award at the Accreditation Showcase for Young to Middle-aged Performers in Professional Companies in Suzhou.
Shen Fengying (as Du Liniang)
Shen Fengying is an outstanding young artist of the Suzhou Kunqu Opera Theatre of Jiangsu. She was trained in the guimendan (young unmarried lady) roles and coached by the famous Kunqu artists. Zhang Jiqing and Liu Jiyan. She won the Performance Award at the first Kunqu Arts Festival in China, and the Silver Award at the Accreditation Showcase for Young to Middle-aged Performers in Professional Companies in Suzhou.