Influences
In Pining... In Peach Blossom Land, playwright Stan Lai wove together a number of theatre forms, cultural references, and personal experiences to create a rich and complex play. Lai's idea for the play's central plotline--two theatre companies fighting for the same rehearsal space--came from an incident that he witnessed in the 1980s. He was watching a rehearsal of an experimental play being directed by one of his colleagues in Taiwan. Suddenly, a group of people barged into the room with a piano and began decorating the stage. The director started yelling at them for interrupting his rehearsal. Then children and parents came filing into the room and, as Lai recalls, "all of a sudden there was a kindergarten graduation ceremony." This strange juxtaposition of two very different groups vying for the same stage gave Lai the idea for the plot of Pining... In Peach Blossom Land.*
In Pining... In Peach Blossom Land, Lai chose two juxtapose two very different types of plays--one is a serious, realistic drama and the other is a comedy in a non-realistic style derived from traditional Chinese Opera. Lai became intrigued by the relationship between serious drama and tragedy while he was a doctoral student at the University of California-Berkeley. He was fascinated by the fact that, in Ancient Greece, tragedies were always performed in groups of three and were always accompanied by a fourth, comic play. Lai has said: "People may consider tragedy and comedy as opposing concepts but I started to see it differently."* In Pining... In Peach Blossom Land, Lai explored the way these two genres compliment and reflect one another. As audience members watching the play, we see that, when comedy and tragedy are woven together, they can take us on an even more powerful emotional journey than when one genre is presented alone.
