Step Across Time and Space: Cross-Cultural Investigation

In 1999, the Lincoln Center Festival brought a new interpretation of Tang Xianzu’s The Peony Pavilion to New York, directed by Shi-Zheng Chen. Peony was written in 1598, Shakespeare’s era in the West, and is considered one of the masterpieces of Chinese Kunqu opera. It became the most popular play of the Ming Dynasty. The twenty-hour-long play, which moves from reality into a supernatural world, features a powerful central female heroine, Du Liniang, who falls in love and enters into a series of adventures in a dream. The producer of the Lincoln Center Festival, John Rockwell, learned of this classic masterpiece while traveling through China looking for material. The young director Shi-Zheng Chen was an interpreter and guide on this trip. Rockwell encouraged Shi-Zheng to stage his own production of the complete story and, when he saw the results, invited it to Lincoln Center. Shi-Zheng, his leading lady Qian Yi, and several of the musicians involved with the piece traveled to New York after Peony’s preview run in Shanghai to prepare for the transfer, and then, suddenly, the new production was banned by the Chinese government on the grounds that it was “decadent.” The sets were seized and held at the airport in Shanghai. It took the intervention of the Lincoln Center Board and several political figures including, reputedly, Henry Kissinger, to persuade the Chinese government to release the sets and allow the production to proceed in the United States. The artists already there would not be allowed to return to China, however. The Peony Pavilion was a huge success, with its large cast, innovative staging with water, live birds, and ambient noise, its beautiful music, and extraordinary acting. It went on to be staged at the Festival d’Automne in Paris, the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, the Perth International Arts Festival, the Aarhus Festival in Denmark, the Berlin Festival, the Vienna Festival, the Singapore Arts Festival, and, finally, the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina.