Who Is Selling Stan Lai — and the Play That Runs Eight Hours?

"Of course China has masters too, but for now there's only one. As for a second, my eyes just aren't sharp enough to have found him yet. But you'll see — the next generation definitely has hope. They carry no baggage, and they're full of love for the world."

This is the last moment in the life of Gu Xianglan, a courtesan. A great beauty in her youth, she is old now, lying in a Taipei hospital bed, telling the story of a life spent fleeing one cage for another. In the two beds beside her lie the Count who once helped her escape the brothel and "Patient No. 5," who has been listening to her story all along. All three of them are dying.

Less than a meter away, at the center of the stage, is a sunken block of seats holding 248 people who are barely breathing. The seats turn slowly. The audience has been sitting there for eight hours.

This is A Dream Like a Dream, by the Taiwanese director Stan Lai. In April 2013 the play was staged in mainland China for the first time and was immediately called a "theatrical epic" and "the summation of Stan Lai's art" — nearly eight hours long, with the main seating block set inside a "lotus pond" at the center of the stage, while dozens of actors playing more than a hundred characters perform at once on a two-level, 360-degree stage that wraps around the audience.

That September, when the first mainland tour ended, A Dream Like a Dream had quickly become Stan Lai's best-known work. The Shanghai run alone took in more than 10 million yuan that year.

The first person to call A Dream Like a Dream an "epic" was Stan Lai himself. In 2010, the producer Wang Keran, who had just worked with Lai on the mainland tour of The Village (《宝岛一村》), was handed a program note describing The Village as Lai's most successful work. Lai read it and told him: you should take a look — I have another play called A Dream Like a Dream.

In his book Stan Lai's Theory of Creativity (《赖声川的创意学》), Lai spends 14 pages on how this unwieldy work took shape. Beginning in June 1990, drawing on what he had seen in Rome, London, France and India, he slowly began turning over a question: if, inside a story, someone has a dream, and inside that dream someone else tells a story, how could such a play be staged? In 1999 he opened a theater-production course at Taipei National University of the Arts and decided to build a large-cast play together with the 60 students who enrolled.

Everything he had been thinking came together then. He happened at the time to be reading Sogyal Rinpoche's The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, which describes a young doctor who kept losing patients and who, in order to practice "self-exchange," began sitting at their bedsides and listening to the life stories of the dying. Taking that as his opening, Lai wrote his own sense of life, death, time and space into the play's outline. A stupa near where he worked gave him a further idea — that the actors might circle the audience the way pilgrims circle a stupa, and let the play unfold around them.

In February 2000, A Dream Like a Dream premiered as a workshop production at Zellerbach Hall Room 7, an experimental theater at the University of California, Berkeley, running three and a half hours. In May 2000 the full eight-hour version was performed at the Arts Center of Taipei National University of the Arts. In 2002 the play was staged in Hong Kong, where it won Best Overall Production, Best Costume Design and Best Supporting Actor at the 12th Hong Kong Drama Awards.

By 2010, when Wang Keran finished reading the script online, A Dream Like a Dream had not been performed for five years.

The reason was simple: the play asks for too much. It needs more than 30 actors for over 100 named characters, and many of them have to play several roles at once. Its "circling the stupa" staging demands a particular kind of space — both the seating and the stage have to be built from scratch. Eight hours is a severe test of an audience's patience. And with the play staged at small-theater range, how many people could watch it at one time anyway?

How Wang Keran and Stan Lai came together, and why they set up a company for the partnership, starts with one of Wang's own productions.

In 2008 Wang Keran, who had been drifting among Beijing television stations as a producer and director, got the chance to organize a celebration for the nearly finished Huahui Theatre, on behalf of Huahui Era Theatre and its parent, CCTV Television Culture Center Co., Ltd. (TVCC). As the theater's opening production, it was also billed as a tribute to "fifty years of Chinese television" and "the 50th anniversary of China Central Television."

Wang, who had studied playwriting early on, proposed a stage play, directed by the Taiwanese director Stan Lai. A year earlier Lai's Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land had made its mainland premiere, and it "made up for every regret he'd had in the theater until then."

Once Lai joined, the work marking "fifty years of Chinese television" was named Watch TV With Me — a title that on its face gives no one much reason to buy a ticket. Wang's argument: "In the 30 years of reform and opening-up, if one object played a part nothing else could have, it has to be the television. It brought materialism into China."

Watch TV With Me was later called "the top mainland Chinese stage production of 2008-2009." In the two years before it, 2007 and 2008, Chinese film box office grew by more than 26 percent a year. Plays from Meng Jinghui's studio, such as Rhinoceros in Love and Amber, already carried real weight in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. The New Year stage comedies Mahua FunAge launched in 2003 had built a small market of their own, and five of its productions, among them Crazy Stone, were running all year without a break. In 2007, riding the popularity of costume comedy, the stage version of My Own Swordsman played Shanghai and Nanjing and took in 20 million yuan over the year.

None of this seemed to have much to do with the success of Watch TV With Me.

In 2008 the play began touring Hangzhou, Henan, Chengdu and elsewhere, and hit trouble everywhere: local organizers changed their minds at the last minute, the presale agent pulled its money out, a venue caught fire. Wang tried every commercial trick he had. In Hangzhou the show toured under the name "Mercedes-Benz Night," with tickets sold against a Mercedes backdrop; two performances sold only 600,000 yuan of tickets, rescued by a 300,000-yuan naming fee from Mercedes. The same story repeated itself in Henan and Guiyang. In the end Watch TV With Me, which had cost close to 10 million yuan up front, lost several million.

The one consolation was that Yanghua Theatre took shape along the way. According to a 2009 article in Southern Weekly, the company — its name stitched together from CCTV's Chinese name and Huahui's — had originally been set up by the Taiwanese side for this one project. By 2008, Wang Keran, nine months into Watch TV With Me, "had no choice" but to take the company over, and over the next decade he tied it to Stan Lai and to stage drama.

In February 2010, Wang and Lai worked together on the mainland tour of The Village, whose opening-night box office beat that year's Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land. Next they worked with Ding Naizheng, another Taiwanese director from the Performance Workshop, on the comedy Baby, I'm Sorry (《宝贝对不起》). By the time he took on A Dream Like a Dream in 2013, the 43-year-old Wang Keran was a fairly seasoned theater producer.

By then China's live-performance market was worth 10.8 billion yuan a year, 73 percent of it earned by professional and non-professional venues staging plays, operas and other stage work. According to the 2011-2012 China Performing Arts Industry Investment Report, the stage-play market, spreading out from Beijing and Shanghai to the rest of the country, was then one of the performing-arts businesses most worth investing in.

Over those three years Wang also worked out what a theater producer has to be able to do: judge and understand how an artistic product relates to the people alive right now; organize and execute, and if necessary climb in and finish the work himself; and shape public feeling by promoting and running the work.

He had seen the effect of star power as far back as Watch TV With Me. On the strength of TVCC's backing, that production had signed Jeff Chang, Nick Cheung, Zhang Jingchu and Cheng Qian. In the second- and third-tier cities on the tour, where "Stan Lai isn't as famous as Andy Lau," those names added a good deal to the box office. So from the start of the 2013 tour, A Dream Like a Dream brought in performers who were hot at the moment — Li Yuchun, Ma Sichun — to sell tickets.

The stage design, which looked impossible to build, became another selling point. Wang went to the Poly Theatre, a longtime partner of Yanghua, with his demand for a 360-degree stage. Having promised "not to move a single nail" in the Poly, he and the Taiwanese team settled on a conversion: sink the middle of the main stage, install 248 rotating seats to make the "lotus pond" Lai wanted, and build a surrounding walkway and a second-level stage for the actors. Every remaining theater seat was raised, so that seats that had faced the stage now looked down on it — which meant the cheap seats could see the whole show too.

The rebuild let A Dream Like a Dream, a play suited only to small theaters, perform to 1,000 people at once. The view varied wildly from seat to seat, but it at least served their original plan of "bringing more people close to the stage."

Eight hours and a 360-degree stage drew plenty of attention on their own, and the team then began selling Stan Lai's own creative history as well. Phrases from "theatrical epic" to "a triumph of contemporary Chinese theater" were attached to the play again and again, and the image of Lai circling a stupa, meditating on Zhuangzi's dream of the butterfly, became part of the work from then on.

At a cast meet-and-greet in 2018 marking five years of touring, they invited the audience to the Poly as usual. Actors and audience members passed one another slips of paper with the word "dream" written on them, and Lai tied it all up at the end, talking about dreams, life and death, reincarnation, fate. A Dream Like a Dream had become, in effect, a "spiritual product" aimed straight at the soul.

"All of it is how I operate. I use every means I have to hint to potential audiences, to tell them, that they might see a different kind of stage, that they might feel something new and strong, a story with the power to move them," Wang said.

By 2013, Yanghua was breaking even.

Even so, this way of running a play drew criticism. The first complaint was about the "lotus pond." Because those seats were few, the top ticket price in 2013 was 2,013 yuan, sold separately for each half of the show — 4,026 yuan for both. Prices came down somewhat in later years, but anyone who couldn't get a pond seat watched the actors' backs, and people upstairs had to bring their own binoculars.

In 2016 one audience member wrote after a performance: "Sorting seats by price, so that a higher-priced ticket gets a better view than a lower-priced one, is fair enough. But that doesn't mean audiences who paid less should be left completely lost about what is happening onstage just because they paid less — and that is exactly what is happening in the theater at A Dream Like a Dream."

And while star power pulled in people with no particular feel for theater, their behavior in the hall drew repeated complaints from everyone else. Add a plot that reaches a bit high and sags in places, plus the stiff "Taiwan-style" jokes in Stan Lai's writing, and it is true that as A Dream Like a Dream nears its 20th year, its once-revolutionary force has been fading.

Then again, it was never a high-return project. By Wang Keran's account, over five years of touring each performance brought in only about 50,000 to 600,000 yuan. Against five runs of ten performances a year in Beijing and the cost of the cast, that is not a large number — and that, in his telling, is precisely why he keeps pushing the work. "But you still have to perform it. If you don't perform, you can't bring more audiences in, you can't reach more people, you can't push Chinese theater forward, and the audience gets even harder to grow. It's that simple."

After A Dream Like a Dream, they worked with Lai and the Performance Workshop on plenty of other projects. Some of them, such as Winter Journey (《冬之旅》) in 2015 and The Seagull in 2017, did not use texts written by Lai and still did well at the box office.

For 2018 they planned to make Cao Yu's Peking Man their lead production, while Lai's classics — Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land, That Night, We Performed Crosstalk on the Road (《那一夜，在旅途中说相声》) — would keep running through the year. As for why they stay tied to Stan Lai, Wang Keran explained: "Of course China has masters too, but for now there's only one. As for a second, my eyes just aren't sharp enough to have found him yet. But you'll see — the next generation definitely has hope. They carry no baggage, and they're full of love for the world."

Cover image: a production still of A Dream Like a Dream shot by CRI Online, via Weibo; in-body images, except where noted, are from Douban.