Ceng Jing Ru Shi (Ago) by Stan Lai

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ceng Jing Ru Shi (Ago) by Stan Lai Chiayi Seetoo CENG JING RU SHI (AGO). Text and direction by Stan Lai. Theatre Above, Shanghai, China. 9–22 December 2019. Ceng Jing Ru Shi 曾經如是(Ago) is the latest work written and directed by Stan Lai, which was premiered in Shanghai in December, 2019. The play lasted for more than five hours with more than forty speaking characters (including Tibetans, Chinese Han people, Americans, all kinds of animals, a mythical sacred beast, Time, and Chance), stretching the timespan of twenty-five years in the play’s setting. It was presented in a “circular staging” configuration pioneered by Lai in which the stage is built surrounding the audience who would then experience dramatic actions circling around them.1 Alongside playacting were the semi-panoramic backdrop projection and enchanting live singing, creating a feast for the senses as an unusual metropolitan theatre-ritual, which also marked the grand finale of the year for Lai’s own theatre venue, Theatre Above, in Shanghai. The devastating COVID-19 that soon followed, however, caught everyone in shock and halted live theatre for a long time. The pandemic that has resulted in millions of deaths became ominously reminiscent of the major phenomenon featured in Ago—deadly disasters—as if theatrical illusion should foreshadow reality. While the swift spreading of the disease has reminded us of our deeply interconnected conditions, the post-pandemic moment allows us to further contemplate, with renewed hindsight, the eco-cosmopolitan concerns embedded in Ago—present in the cross-cultural and even cross-species backgrounds of its characters and large-scale geographical movements (across a mountain village of China’s southwest, New York, and the Kanchenjunga mountain of the Himalayas). Ago unfolds by way of storytelling. The narrator JJ, also one of the characters, studied history at Beijing University. A disillusioned angry youth, she abandons herself to faraway lands and ends up in a mountain village of Yunnan Province in China, where she befriends the Tibetan residents, among them the principal characters Pema, Dorje, and Tashi. Then, a fatal earthquake changes everyone’s life. Ten years later, these survivors end up in New York, where they are hit once again by the September 11 attack. The first two acts of the play are set in the Yunnan village and New York respectively, with Pema’s noodle shop, a homelike gathering place in both locales, standing unchanged at the same spot onstage. With skillful staging highlighting key repetitions onstage, Lai transmits the feeling of life, recurring almost like mirror images, “as it used to be” (the literal translation of Ceng Jing Ru Shi), be it acts of survival such as Pema’s running of the noodle shop, or unexpected lethal blows preceded by people scurrying about in horror [End Page 200] followed by post-disaster distress and devastation. Along the way, various vignettes of encounters become increasingly entangled and, as if drawn into a centripetal swirl, evolve toward a singular goal in the third act. It involves a group of nine people embarking on a collective journey to the Kanchenjunga mountain in search of the legendary Pure Land (jingtu 淨土a reference to the utopic realm in the Buddhist tradition), only to end in yet another disaster, a snow avalanche from which only JJ and Pema survive. They go back to New York and continue with their lives. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Pema (Hao Lei) in Ago. (Photo by Wang Kai) Punctuated by the deadly disasters and the anti-climax of not finding the Pure Land, the play is structured like an experimental symphony while exuding a fable-like quality. The impossible journey to the Pure Land is itself a powerful metaphor, while interspersed in the play are also dry-humored quasi-philosophical remarks made by personifications of Time and Chance, who would begin to circle on the stage before the arrival of disasters. The surreal is fused in the realistic plane of action and acting style on Lai’s stage. And as in Aesop’s fables or Zhuangzi’s Daoist fables, the surreal dimensions of Ago resonate with much of the longstanding ways in which moral or philosophical teachings...