Li Dan

Taiwan playwright and director Stan Lai’s new work, “Total Women,” the latest of his “Crosstalk” series, will have its premiere in Shenzhen next Wednesday.

Like his past works, the show is charged with wisdom, concerns for human life and social problems.

“We Chinese have been burdened with too many things, and crosstalk may be the only comic expression we have inherited from our forefathers,” said Lai, a master of innovation.

His crosstalk series has been a hit in the Chinese world since the first part — “That Evening, We Performed Crosstalk” — debuted in 1985.

“It was an attempt to address the fact that this incredible, wonderful art form had died out in Taiwan. I had just got my Ph.D from Berkeley and I thought it would be a nice intellectual exercise to present the death of a cultural form. If people can’t relate to it, then does it become a museum piece? Do you retire it? What happens? That was what I wanted the play to do.

“But we ended up using crosstalk, or standup comedy, to create new pieces of comedy to actually reflect on its death — which was a complicated proposal. I thought it was going to be a very intellectual enterprise, but it turned out to be a huge popular hit,” he recalled.

His Performance Workshop then created four others in the genre: “This Evening, Who Will Perform Crosstalk?” (1989), “Another Evening, They Performed Crosstalk” (1997), “Millennium, We Performed Crosstalk” (2000), and “Total Women” (or “This Evening, Women Perform Crosstalk,” 2005).

The past “Crosstalk” pieces were dominated by cultural and political concerns, whereas “Total Women” addresses the frustrations of women, talking about their jobs, emotions and lives.

Unlike his previous works that often had their mainland premiere in Beijing, this show will debut in Shenzhen.

“It’s relevant, because women make up the majority of the population in this young city,” he said.

The play begins with Betty and Annie hosting a gala event for a women’s products company called Total Women. They wait for an old woman, reportedly a master of crosstalk, a comedic art form that never had female practitioners. The old woman doesn’t show up. “She’s dead,” claims her granddaughter Funny, who has come in her stead to perform.

“Chinese women’s voices were seldom heard in the past, unless the hot-tempered ones were cursing their sisters-in-law or neighbors in front of their homes. So the audience will find it satirical that the woman crosstalk master is in fact a hot-tempered housewife expert at cursing on the street,” Lai explained.

“I think over the past 20 years my work has featured a dramatic theory called ‘to teach and to delight.’ I always thought that was kind of corny, but actually my work pretty much does that. I’ve felt that over the years people come to my plays and get entertained but also something more. They always leave the theater with something to think about — sometimes a very radical way of thinking about things — how to change their lives, how to change society. If I dare say I have wisdom to impart, then it’s all there, in my work.”

The playwright said he was lucky because when he went back to Taiwan in 1983 to make theater, modern Chinese theater simply did not exist.

“It wasn’t like I went somewhere to start a revolution; I went to a desert to build something because there was nothing there. The name of my group is Performance Workshop; in Chinese it’s something even more generic. The government wouldn’t even let me register it as a theater group because it was too generic a name. You can’t name a restaurant ‘Restaurant;’ you can’t name a theater group ‘Theater Group,’ but that’s basically what it means. I named it that so it could encompass any possibility.”

Lai’s works are neither Chinese nor Western, neither mainstream nor avant-garde, and neither comedy nor tragedy. And if you change the “neither…nor” to “both…and,” it works too. The result is, audiences love them, no matter whether they are professors or blue-collar workers.

To show her confidence in the show, Zheng Weiqian, manager of Shenzhen Performance Company, revealed that it will be performed for five consecutive nights at the Grand Theater, an unprecedented run in Shenzhen.