Production History
- Stan Lai’s Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land was first performed in 1986 by his theatre company, the Performance Workshop.
- Since then it has been sensationally popular throughout the Chinese-speaking region.
- In 1991, the troupe toured America with a Mandarin- language production.
- In 1992, Lai made a film called The Peach Blossom Land, featuring the most famous Taiwanese actress in the Chinese-speaking theatre, Brigitte Lin. The film universally received great praise along with many international film awards.
- Lai asked on Chinese Twitter how many people had performed in his play, and found out that there were more than 800 unauthorized productions, mainly in schools.
Collective Creation
Performance Workshop creates plays by developing them as a group. This method was developed by Lai, and was directly influenced by his work with Shireen Strooker of the Amsterdam Werktheater at the University of California, Berkeley in the early 1980s. The director initially spends considerable time working on an idea before rehearsals start. In the first rehearsal, a detailed outline of the plot is presented to the actors. Then the director and the actors spend a long time exploring who the characters are. This is followed by intensive improvisation led by the director. After a couple of weeks, a script is written, usually by the director, based on what happened during the improvisations. Then finally the actors rehearse according to the script.