Debra Li

STAN LAI, Taiwanese star playwright and director, became a popular name and box-office guarantee last year, with his dramas “Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land” and “Total Woman” passionately received by mainland audiences.

After 10 years of experimenting in the mainland market, Lai is harvesting huge box-office revenues. This year, he will follow up his success with a long performance season, starting in Shanghai in March and coming to the Shenzhen Grand Theater in April.

The program will include “Secret Love,” cross-talk drama “Total Woman” as well as Lai’s newest play “Like Shadows,” which was first staged in Taipei at the end of last year.

“Like Shadows” will bring to the mainland stage a stellar cast of Taiwanese actors and actresses that include theater diva Ding Naizheng, Golden Horse winner Qu Zhongheng, Zhu Zhiying who had a supporting role in the movie “Lust, Caution,” and film star Bowie Tseng. Reports said that Hong Kong movie star Carina Lau had been tapped for the show after she vividly portrayed a cunning rich woman in the thriller “Curiosity Kills the Cat.”

The themes covered in “Like Shadows” are outside the norm for Lai, who often investigates forgotten Chinese theatrical forms and obscure stories and then revives them.

Trying at plots of murder, adultery, neglect and a little detective work, the 150-minute play was originally written while Lai, artistic di-rector of Performance Workshop, was a visiting professor at Stanford University teaching a class on collective creation through the use of improvisation.

“I started by asking my student actors: ‘Are you aware of any of your family or friends who have recently passed away but are having trouble going to the next stage,’” Lai recalled.

A follower of Buddhism, Lai has often been haunted with the issue that a person might not get where they hope to after death, because of some sort of obsession with or attachment to life.

One student from Chicago talked about a friend whose father killed his mother thinking that she was having an affair with a neighbor. The father then committed suicide. Lai used the story as the topic for his students’ workshop, which spawned “Stories for the Dead.”

“We started from a real event and started unfolding the fictitious events which were much more interesting. And lots of other characters emerged — some imaginary, some real, and it became a tapestry of real and unreal figures,” Lai said.

From this, the play “Like Shadows” was developed. The plot follows the life of a troubled teenage girl, who is investigating the cause of her mother’s death and her father’s mysterious disappearance. In the process she becomes capable of communicating with the spirit world. When her parents suddenly begin to appear to her, shocking secrets about her family tragedy are revealed.

The play is a lot about neglect and dysfunctional families whose members neglect each other. In the play, Buddhism becomes the lens through which Lai investigates the girl’s life ridden with mysteries. Through Buddhism she is eventually able to come to terms with her troubled past.

To the joy of those who have missed previous performances of “Secret Love,” the season will begin with this Lai classic, a production co-staged by the Performance Workshop and the China National Drama Theater. The show, rich and passionate in content and creative in form, has won stormy acclamation from audiences and critics. Dubbed one of the 10 best plays in the century-long history of modern Chinese drama, it has been performed more than 60 times since the present production was first performed in November 2006.

The attraction of “Secret Love” is also in its stellar cast, which brings together Huang Lei, Yuan Quan, Yu Entai, Xie Na and He Jiong. However, busy and occupied with their individual work, the stars have pledged to cancel or postpone other jobs for the play, until they have performed it 100 times.

Besides Shanghai and Shenzhen, Lai’s show season will make stops in other mainland cities like Beijing and Suzhou, according to Yuan Hong, producer with the Performance Workshop on the mainland.