After hearing me summarizing the plot of the play, a friend of mine decides to call it a play about plays. Indeed, this show in its plot is about a tragedy troupe and a comedy troupe and the irresponsible theatre that causes all the fuss. This, though, is a crude view. In my opinion, what this play really is about is the often assessed dichotomy between reality and imagination in various aspects of life, especially in marriage and love. The plays within the play, though contrasting in almost all production aspects, essentially explore the same ideas: compared with the illusions generated by one’s imagination, reality is oftentimes much more ruthless.

      In Secret Love, the ageless image of the lost lover as a beautiful and understanding young girl lingered on our male protagonist’s mind for forty years; yet when she finally appears in front of him, much illusion is lost, as he has to face the reality that she is now a grandma and walks with as much difficulty as he does. Similarly, in the Land of the Peach Blossoms, Lao Tao thought that all conflicts could be resolved when the trio goes into the utopian land, but the very existence of such a land is put understand question. Through weaving the two beautifully together, the playwright aims to strike the disillusioning message into the viewers’ minds.

      This play touches upon various aspects of the Chinese culture. The historical setting of the play Secret Love is the Chinese civil war in the late 1940s and the consequent split between mainland and Taiwan. More important though is the concept of the land of the peach blossoms. This place has long been the synonym of utopia in Chinese. As provided in the pages before, the script written by Tao Yuanming in the early 5 th century AD depicts a land of perfect harmony. The playwright cleverly draws the root for the comedy from the script to use as a basis for his exploration of the subject matter, borrowing character names such as Liu Ziji and places such as Wuling and Nanyang. More interestingly, in Chinese, the names of the three main characters Tao, Hua and Yuan together form the Chinese word for the Land of Peach Blossoms (Taohuayuan). These designs may be lost in translation, so a survey of such devices is important for the audience to understand the clever designs of the playwright.

      This is Princeton Chinese Theatre (PCT)’s first ever show, and I am greatly honoured to be able to direct it along with Chen. Our theatre company is just over six months old and since April we have been working extremely hard to build PCT from the ground. Each step taken along the process is viewed as a major victory from our perspective, be it funding, publicity or training actors and actresses. Producing the show has been a long and arduous process. Most of the cast you will see today had zero acting experience just two months ago, and now they already have a firm grasp of the stage, which itself attests to the amount of work we did in the past eight weeks.

      Much gratitude should be given out to various people and we leave it for the acknowledg-ment section. Thank you all for coming out to watch this show. You are witnessing the birth of a new theatre company and a group of people whose life shall be different hereafter.

                                                                                                      Jerry Yingzhi Peng '10