Like most modern plays in Taiwan, the script for My Dear originated with the actors themselves. The storyline is based on the well-known 19th Century Ching Dynasty tale of "Little White Cabbage" — a timeless folktale of marital infidelity where a beautiful wife enjoys a liaison with a scholar, and her frustrated husband eventually dies under mysterious circumstances.
But the Easy Workers Theatre Company expands and updates the story by matching the historical tale with a parallel one set in Taiwan during the 1980s. In the latter, a bored young Taipei wife carries on an affair with her boss, while her less successful husband furiously plots their doom. Making rich use of these two time periods, the script creatively and comically juxtaposes past and present.
The acting styles alternate as well. In the historical part of the play, the actors imitate the studied body movement and lyrical vocal rhythms of Peking opera, and they perform in the elaborate water-sleeved clothing typical of that specialized form of theatre. This contrasts sharply with the modern parts of the play, where the acting is realistic and the costumes are fashionable business suits and designer dresses. Occasionally, the two stories and periods comically overlap: a beautiful clock sitting on the bedroom table in the Ching Dynasty version is described in the modern version as "an antique."
Director Danny Dun — showing that the laughable absurdities on stage are nevertheless "a regular part of our lives."
Danny Dun, the director of the play, says the production was originally conceived as a comedy, but it took on a life of its own. "In the beginning, we didn't set out to confront the audience with any serious messages, but during rehearsals, we began to discover the serious side of the material. So the play became black comedy; it has marriage breakups, poisonings, deaths. But while laughing at the absurdity of these things on the stage, we also recognize they are a regular part of our lives." The counter-pointed arrangement of time periods tells the audience, in Dun's words, that "marital infidelity has been going on for a long time, and from then until now human beings haven't changed a bit."
The actors themselves discovered some important contrasts in the process of refining the staging of My Dear. Sylvia Chang, who played "Cabbage" in both time periods, says "the role of women has obviously become more independent." The original Cabbage had no freedom, but was kept in the house protected like a beautiful and treasured showpiece. The modern Cabbage not only has a better job than her husband, she — like many modern Taipei wives — controls his finances as well. Similarly, while the lover in the historical scenes impresses Cabbage with his calligraphy and melodic recitation of Tang Dynasty poetry, in the 1980s setting his main attractions are business acumen and worldly savoir-faire. The latter is comically demonstrated by his ability to sing "Happy Birthday" in English.
Certainly the most poignant moment of the play is its final scene, when the two cuckolded husbands met in heaven. From that exalted perspective, they look down at "Little White Cabbage," now an old woman of 60 years, as she sits in her wheelchair and giggles to herself over a TV program. This image confronts the audience with a final, stirring irony: after all the joy and pain of romance, love, and jealousy, those struggles inevitably seem meaningless.
How Do You Like the Dinner, My Dear? is a fresh example of the newly-established genre of modern Chinese theatre in Taiwan. Before the economic miracle transformed the island, general poverty made it infeasible for the average Taiwan citizen to devote much interest to experimental theatre. Actress Loretta Kong, now 26 years old, recalls the late 1960s, when the few productions of absurdist dramas such as Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot were ill-attended events. "People didn't have time to think about the meaning of life," she says. "They were just trying to live."
A jealous husband buys rat poison, but not for rodents — the plot of My Dear juxtaposes and alternates between 19th Century China and contemporary times.
But attitudes have changed. The economic miracle brought about a society more liberal and international, and has breathed new life into the arts. Today, local director Robert Liu laughs at what he calls the old days of "TV Theatre," those productions where actors moved like puppets and walked through their roles without any expressions of genuine feeling. "At that time," Liu says, "theatre was not regarded as an art, but as a business for beautiful women and handsome men."
One of the major obstacles to good modern theater, according to actress Ma Ting-ni, was a basic misunderstanding of what a modern play was supposed to be: "The whole conception of acting was wrong. Actors always used the same technique-an exaggerated voice-to portray their feelings." Because it is a common Confucian practice for Chinese people to internalize their deepest emotions rather than express them, Chinese actors at first relied on a clumsy imitation of Western acting styles. "The result," Ma says, "was terrible."
Because the East and the West have separate theatrical histories, Chinese students who wanted to be experimental were initially at a loss. Classical Chinese theatre offered no precedent for the modern Western theatrical techniques of improvisation and free expression, techniques with roots in the passionate and cathartic ritual theatre of Greece and Rome. "At first, we thought Western acting was crazy," Ma says with a laugh. "We weren't used to seeing actors crying or screaming on stage." Traditional Chinese theatre did not put emphasis on emotion, but on concentrated, rational control. Thus, because the complicated gestures of Peking opera required years of study, little value was accorded to improvisational acting.
Cast experimentations led unexpectedly to "black comedy"— Sylvia Chang as the unfaithful "Cabbage" is delighted by a letter from her lover.
Although the long-revered acting style of Peking opera was still cherished and enjoyed in Taiwan, the younger generation became restless for change. The age-old tales acted out in Peking opera, and the classical language used by the actors, seemed far too remote from daily experience, especially as the island became increasingly cosmopolitan.
In 1979, a group of young actors known as Lan Ling put together a production called Ho Chu's New March. This play, which had a prostitute as its main character, was the first that dared to tamper with Peking opera and update it with everyday language and modern Taipei colloquialisms. Through comedy it reflected the materialism of the new bourgeoisie.
The play began with the traditional clanging of gongs and the entrance of a hand-carried cart familiar in Peking opera. But a startled audience soon noticed that the cart sported the status-laden hood ornament of a Mercedes Benz. A laugh rang out, then another. Soon the hall was filled with excited sounds of surprise and delight. A new vitality spread from the actors to the audience — a revolution in Chinese theatre had begun.
This breakthrough production, which played to packed houses, finally closed the distance between the elitism of traditional theatre and everyday life in contemporary Taiwan. "Some people who came to see it said they had never laughed so hard in their whole lives," Ma says. "Even young people started to love theatre." The enthusiasm engendered by this and subsequent experiments with modern theatre is now reinforced by the recent addition of theatre departments to several local universities.
As a writing brush reminds "Cabbage" of her lover, her knowing husband winces in jealous frustration.
Lan Ling also set a precedent for a more intellectual and creative altitude toward play performances. In recent years, new plays have turned to other traditional stories and transformed them. One of these, Journey to the West, was particularly ambitious and complex [see FCR, June 1988]. Originally the tale of a monk who travels west to India in search of esoteric Buddhist knowledge, the revision by director and playwright Stan Lai tells the story of a Taipei high school student who passes the TOEFL exam, and then goes to reap the benefits of a university education in the exotic Western land of America. Another example, which was an especially radical fusion of art forms, occurred in 1987 when Peking opera was used as a form for interpreting Shakespeare's Macberh [see FCR, March 1987].
Taiwan's affluence is encouraging greater interest in the arts, and director Danny Dun sees a positive future for the ebullient force of modern Chinese theatre. "And now, with the opening of the mainland," he says, "it might soon be possible to take local productions there on tour." While his thoughts are ambitious, so has been the recent history of modern theatre in Taiwan. It is intriguing to speculate what the reaction might be to the transformed Peking opera style of acting found in How Do You Like the Dinner, My Dear? if it were taken back to its original homeland of Peking.