Peach Blossom Fan (review)

Abstract

PEACH BLOSSOM FAN. Adapted by Edward Mast from the original play by Kung Shang-Ren. Conceived and directed by Chen Shi-Zheng. REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) at the Disney Concert Hall Complex. Los Angeles, California. 9 April 2004. This ninety-minute world premiere by Chen Shi-Zheng, the director who previously brought you the nineteen-hour Peony Pavilion, is very different from that controversial work. Unlike Peony Pavilion, Chen is not attempting recreate, recuperate, or resuscitate ancient performance. Rather, this new work is part of a series of projects that Chen is creating with contemporary non-Asian writers in which they adapt classics into new works. The previous two plays in this series were Chen and Charles Mee's adaptation of Snow in June for ART in Cambridge, Massachusets, and Chen and David Greenspan's adaptation of The Orphan of Chou at New York's Lincoln Center. I did not see either of the previous two works, but in the case of Peach Blossom Fan, the resulting opera style owes a great deal Brecht and very little kunju. Chen and company's interest appears be more in how the text as narrative resonates ironically with contemporary life, rather than with the performance elements of kunju. From my perspective, the resonances were powerful and clear. What I saw (and wrote about in the LA Times [19 April 2004], reprinted in the AAP Newsletter, Spring 2004) convinced me that Chen was directly commenting on the Japanese occupation of China and the Rape of Nanjing during World War II, and on the American occupation of Iraq today. As I wrote then: The play, like its 1699 original, is set primarily in a brothel in Nanjing, China. Japanese popular music plays. Overhead, a huge dragonfly is suspended, nose down, like a kamikaze airplane about crash. Outside, a war is raging. Corrupt, greedy officials and a playwright-censor whose goal is to keep power from harming my friends put an impotent, puppet-Emperor on the throne, which is the dragonfly-airplane. The new Emperor literally walks all over the whores' backs on his way the throne. Inside the brothel, a lovely young virgin loves a naive poet. She refuses the advances and jewels of corrupt officials, the playwright, even the Emperor. She prefers death life as a prostitute-concubine. The nation is overrun, the war ends in chaos, death and devastation. At the conclusion, the virgin's ghost and her poet-lover have a brief moment, then fade away. The locale of Nanjing, popular Japanese music, and the dragonfly-kamikaze airplane/imperial throne suggest references the early days of what became World War II. The Japanese Imperial Army invaded China, committing brutal acts of rape and mutilation, including what has been called the Rape of Nanjing. Women (or a helpless nation) became whores for (or collaborators with) the invaders; there was a puppet emperor. But the Chen evokes more than China's bitter past with Japan. It seems me, that he, playwright Edward Mast, and lyricist/composer Stephin Merritt are also commenting directly on the present. The brutality of war, greed, the destruction of free speech, the prostitution of helpless women, the willingness die for the purity of one's beliefs, invasion, and the imposition of usurping rulers--these are all images from today's news. With postmodern irony, Brechtian devices, exotic references, the grotesque lyricism of Genet--but without answers--Peach Blossom Fan suggests the complex, compromised, confusing world in which we live today. Nevertheless, it was the performance aspects that most interested and most confused the audience and the reviewers, virtually all of whom seemed incapable of understanding the complex, ironic, and often brilliant text. In the lobby, young actresses of all ethnicities, made-up and dressed as Disneyesque Chinatown doll-whores, greeted the audience with high pitched Chinese voices squealing Ni hao. …