Podcast appearances and mentions of stan lai

Performers Lansy Feng & Eldon Huang discuss the first English language production of I Me She Him by Taiwanese playwright Stan Lai. Set in Hong Kong in the late 1990s, it explores tensions between China and Taiwan. Performed in Melbourne 22 November to 2 December.  wit incorporated  3CR broadcasts from the stolen lands of the Kulin Nation  

The Selected Plays of Stan Lai (U Michigan Press, 2022) collects a cross-section from the four-decade career of one of the major dramatists of our time. Lai's works, including Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land, are famous throughout the Sinophone world, having been performed in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mainland China. Many lines from his plays have become almost proverbial, quoted by academics and cab drivers alike. The plays collected here are translated by Lai himself, and are suitable for performance (in addition to being a playwright and director, Lai is a theatre scholar with a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley). They retain the humor, theatricality, and pathos that have made Lai one of Asia's most popular playwrights. In this interview we discuss Lai's childhood between the US and Taiwan, as well as his semi-improvised method of playwrighting.  Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The Selected Plays of Stan Lai (U Michigan Press, 2022) collects a cross-section from the four-decade career of one of the major dramatists of our time. Lai's works, including Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land, are famous throughout the Sinophone world, having been performed in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mainland China. Many lines from his plays have become almost proverbial, quoted by academics and cab drivers alike. The plays collected here are translated by Lai himself, and are suitable for performance (in addition to being a playwright and director, Lai is a theatre scholar with a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley). They retain the humor, theatricality, and pathos that have made Lai one of Asia's most popular playwrights. In this interview we discuss Lai's childhood between the US and Taiwan, as well as his semi-improvised method of playwrighting.  Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-american-studies

The Selected Plays of Stan Lai (U Michigan Press, 2022) collects a cross-section from the four-decade career of one of the major dramatists of our time. Lai's works, including Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land, are famous throughout the Sinophone world, having been performed in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mainland China. Many lines from his plays have become almost proverbial, quoted by academics and cab drivers alike. The plays collected here are translated by Lai himself, and are suitable for performance (in addition to being a playwright and director, Lai is a theatre scholar with a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley). They retain the humor, theatricality, and pathos that have made Lai one of Asia's most popular playwrights. In this interview we discuss Lai's childhood between the US and Taiwan, as well as his semi-improvised method of playwrighting.  Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Selected Plays of Stan Lai (U Michigan Press, 2022) collects a cross-section from the four-decade career of one of the major dramatists of our time. Lai's works, including Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land, are famous throughout the Sinophone world, having been performed in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mainland China. Many lines from his plays have become almost proverbial, quoted by academics and cab drivers alike. The plays collected here are translated by Lai himself, and are suitable for performance (in addition to being a playwright and director, Lai is a theatre scholar with a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley). They retain the humor, theatricality, and pathos that have made Lai one of Asia's most popular playwrights. In this interview we discuss Lai's childhood between the US and Taiwan, as well as his semi-improvised method of playwrighting.  Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/performing-arts

The Selected Plays of Stan Lai (U Michigan Press, 2022) collects a cross-section from the four-decade career of one of the major dramatists of our time. Lai's works, including Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land, are famous throughout the Sinophone world, having been performed in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mainland China. Many lines from his plays have become almost proverbial, quoted by academics and cab drivers alike. The plays collected here are translated by Lai himself, and are suitable for performance (in addition to being a playwright and director, Lai is a theatre scholar with a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley). They retain the humor, theatricality, and pathos that have made Lai one of Asia's most popular playwrights. In this interview we discuss Lai's childhood between the US and Taiwan, as well as his semi-improvised method of playwrighting.  Andy Boyd is a playwright based in Brooklyn, New York. He is a graduate of the playwriting MFA at Columbia University, Harvard University, and the Arizona School for the Arts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

The Tony Award-winning composer of Fun Home, Jeanine Tesori, joins us from her Manhattan living room to share her insights into creating great musical theatre. Also, Taiwan-based playwright and theatre director Stan Lai shares what's on his Top Shelf and Humphrey Bower reviews The Met Opera's recent crop of free streaming productions.

The Tony Award-winning composer of Fun Home, Jeanine Tesori, joins us from her Manhattan living room to share her insights into creating great musical theatre.Also, Taiwan-based playwright and theatre director Stan Lai shares what's on his Top Shelf and Humphrey Bower reviews The Met Opera's recent crop of free streaming productions.

The Tony Award-winning composer of Fun Home, Jeanine Tesori, joins us from her Manhattan living room to share her insights into creating great musical theatre. Also, Taiwan-based playwright and theatre director Stan Lai shares what's on his Top Shelf and Humphrey Bower reviews The Met Opera's recent crop of free streaming productions.

In her cabaret show Rendezvous with Marlene, Ute Lemper shares the story of a long phone exchange with an ailing Marlene Dietrich in 1988, The Ripples Before the New Wave documents the lasting impact of the University of Sydney's flourishing drama scene in the late 1950s and early 60s, if the idea of "audience participation" makes many queasy, what drives some theatre makers to invite audiences onto the stage and into the story? And acclaimed Taiwanese playwright and director Stan Lai shares the poem, song, play and film that have inspired his journey as an artist.

In her cabaret show Rendezvous with Marlene, Ute Lemper shares the story of a long phone exchange with an ailing Marlene Dietrich in 1988, The Ripples Before the New Wave documents the lasting impact of the University of Sydney's flourishing drama scene in the late 1950s and early 60s, if the idea of "audience participation" makes many queasy, what drives some theatre makers to invite audiences onto the stage and into the story? And acclaimed Taiwanese playwright and director Stan Lai shares the poem, song, play and film that have inspired his journey as an artist.

Composer Jimmy López, who earned his Ph.D. in music from UC Berkeley in 2012, speaks about Dreamers, an oratorio he was commissioned by Cal Performances to write that is informed by interviews held with undocumented students at UC Berkeley. The piece was written in collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz, who created the libretto. Esa-Pekka Salonen, the music director designate of the San Francisco Symphony, conducted the world premiere performance of Dreamers in Zellerbach Hall on Sunday, March 17 at 3 p.m. with the Philharmonia Orchestra of London, soprano Ana María Martínez, and a chorus of nearly 80 voices, including those from the UC Berkeley Chamber Choir.López's talk was held in an open session of the academic course Thinking Through Art and Design @ Berkeley: Creativity, Migration, Transformation taught by Peter Glazer and Stan Lai held in Osher Auditorium, UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) on Thursday, March 14 at 12 p.m. It was free and open to the public.Read a Q&A with Jimmy López, "Alumnus's 'Dreamers' oratorio inspired by Berkeley undocumented students" on Berkeley News.See events related to upcoming shows by Cal Performances on calperformances.org.Watch the world premiere of Dreamers and read the transcript on Berkeley News. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Stan Lai is an award-winning playwright and director. Currently his play Nightwalk in the Chinese Garden is in production at the Huntington Gardens.  The play is staged in the Chinese Garden, the "Garden of Flowing Fragrance." The audience travels through the garden, over bridges, through pavilions, walking with the actors as they transition from scene to scene, from one magical location to the next, traveling through a journey of the heart, exploring love in all its forms, whether in dream, death, life or theatre, our hearts are deeply moved.   The play inspired a short guided meditation for us to explore all the glorious real estate in our hearts held for all of time, by all that has touched our hearts up to this moment. To read more about Stan Lai's play: http://www.huntington.org/nightwalk/  

Chinese theater-maker Stan Lai (Lai Sheng-chuan 賴聲川) discusses the origins and evolution of Nightwalk in the Chinese Garden, his new, site-specific production for The Huntington. The play is the culmination of Lai's residency at The Huntington as the 2018 Cheng Family Visiting Artist and is developed and produced by the CalArts Center for New Performance.

The good, the bad and the ugly. It’s not just the name of an old Clint Eastwood movie. It’s also a fitting way to think about this year’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival, currently running in Ashland on OSF’s three world-class stages. Yesterday I talked about the VERY GOOD "Head Over Heels," a new musical by Jeff Whitty of "Avenue Q" fame. With summer kicking into gear, there are several shows running on those three stages, and that’s one of the good ones. So let me tell you about the BAD and the UGLY, both of which could be used to describe OSF’s unsatisfying staging of Shakespeare’s "Antony and Cleopatra." Tony and Cleo has NEVER been an easy play to produce. Directors have to find clever ways to establish a coherent tone that’s not actually suggested in the script, which - sorry Mr. Shakespeare - is a bit of a mess. OSF’s Artistic Director Bill Rauch helms this production. Usually spot-on, Rauch appears to have decided to just follow Shakespeare’s unfocused lead, the result being a sometimes entertaining, frequently baffling mish-mash of tonal inconsistencies. By pushing the comedic moments to goofy excess, it diminishes, rather than enhances, the whole flow of the show. Consider the arrival of a bumbling snake seller who acts like an extra from T.V.s Hee-Haw show, a bit of outrageousness that comes just seconds before the tragic demise of a major character. And after watching the supposedly middle-aged Antony and Cleopatra act like lovesick puppies for thirty minutes, it’s hard to feel bad for them when their world starts to crumble under the weight of their irresponsible actions. That’s the point, of course, to show how great societies are often destroyed by the acts of selfish rulers, but it’s just inconceivable that the real Tony and Cleo would have run around squealing and clapping like toddlers at a birthday watching the clown tie balloon animals. Such choices leave the entire enterprise foundering in a kind of dramatic uncertainty. This is a tragedy, after all. In this production, that’s true in many ways. Let’s move back to the category of the GOOD, with the clever, emotionally rich "Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land," written and directed by Stan Lai. The American premiere is a translation of a Chinese play originally performed in in 1986, shortly after the 40-year ban on communication between China and Taiwan had been lifted and families long-separated were taking steps at reunion. In its first-ever English version, Lai takes the original script - a kind of site-specific experiment in which two theater companies attempt to rehearse on the same space - and tailors it to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which is referred to often by name, along with numerous suggestions that someone should call Bill Rauch - mentioned earlier - to come straighten out the mess. One of the plays, the deadly serious drama "Secret Love," is being directed by a Stan Lai stand- in known only as Director, putting his race-blind cast through the paces of a story clearly based on the loss of his one great love. When a group of Chinese-American comedians crash the theater, insisting Bill Rauch has given them the space for their rehearsal, a strange back-and-forth ensues. With an outrageously silly send-up of the ancient Chinese fable Peach Blossom Land - about an unhappily married man who finds a magical world where all his dreams come true, but pines for the wife who never really loved him - the newcomers agree to share the space, with some very funny, genuinely touching results. Oregon Shakespeare Festival runs through November 1. www.osfashland.org I’m David Templeton, Second Row Center, for KRCB.

Influential playwright Stan Lai has stretched the boundaries of the theatrical experience in his native Taiwan, in China, and around the world. He has negotiated the fraught landscape between China and Taiwan through drama, and in recent years through active efforts to reshape the theatrical culture of China. In a wide-ranging conversation with Professor of Modern Chinese History Wen-hsin Yeh, Lai explores his work, his ideas, and his unique vision.