Celebration of a career devoted to the stage

An exhibition, My Life, which highlights renowned director and playwright Stan Lai Sheng-chuan's theatrical works and life in theater, kicked off at Tianqiao Performing Arts Center in Beijing on March 21 and will run to May 21.

Following Lai's decades-long career, the exhibition gathers his handwritten scripts, notes, old photos of him and his theater members during the 1980s, and photos of his theatrical productions, such as Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land, The Village and One One Zero Eight.

The US-born and Taiwan-based director and playwright, 68, studied dramatic art at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his PhD in 1983. That year, he returned to Taiwan and a year later, he directed his first play, We All Grew Up This Way, as well as co-founding a theater called Performance Workshop.

The director and playwright has unveiled about 50 theatrical productions so far.

In 2013, he co-founded the Wuzhen Theatre Festival and in 2015, created Theatre Above, a 700-seat venue in Shanghai dedicated to the performance of his works.

The exhibition features one of Lai's most famous and best-selling plays — Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land, which premiered in 1986 and is still being performed worldwide. In the exhibition, two iconic stage sets from the play are displayed: a large swing and a pink-flowered peach tree.

An old TV is set next to the swing, showcasing photos of the play from different eras. The original recording of the 1986 premiere of the play is also on display.

The exhibition showcases Lai's notes about his life in theater, which he has been sharing on his Sina Weibo account since 2017. So far, he has published over 700.

"Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land has been staged at Theatre Above for weeks and our actors and actresses have been performing the play since 2017. Maybe it will become an in-house performance, like a Broadway show," Lai wrote in his latest Sina Weibo note, dated March 19.

The exhibition also introduced the real-world context behind some of Lai's most celebrated plays, including The Village, which tells the bittersweet stories of people living in Taiwan's military cantonments.

The cantonments, known as juan cun in Chinese (villages for dependents), were intended to temporarily house the families of Kuomintang soldiers who retreated from the Chinese mainland to Taiwan after the civil war. However, with the closure of cross-Straits relations, they ended up becoming permanent settlements. The residents of these villages came from all over the mainland and lived together for decades, trying to cope with cultural and linguistic difference while struggling to keep their own lifestyles and original identity.

According to Lai, the idea for the play came from television producer Wang Wei-chung, who once lived in one of the cantonments. Wang told Lai over 100 stories from 25 families living in juan cun, hoping he would adapt them into a play.

"I asked him, why not adapt the stories into a TV drama. He said that theater can bring the stories alive in a much more interesting way than a TV drama," says Lai.

In one space at the exhibition, a white sofa is placed next to a table and a chair. "I like placing a big table in my studio or anywhere I intend to work. It allows me to read my scripts on a big computer screen," explains Lai in a poster board written for the exhibition. "The white sofa sits next to a window in my house, where I read lots of scripts."

The exhibition was first held in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, in 2021. According to Jiang Qiong, director of the performance management center of Tianqiao Performing Arts Center, it is the first time that the venue has held an exhibition about theater productions. The exhibition is part of the venue's annual festival, Life Is A Poem, which is in its seventh year, and runs from March 21 to May 21.