We pitched Love in A Fallen City because of our admiration of Eileen Chang’s talent. We love how the story is short and focuses on details in Shanghai and Hong Kong, and yet is also about something much greater than the novella’s descriptions.

      We are fortunate that we had an awesome team. Our cast is dedicated, diverse, and talented. We spent countless hours on understanding roles, improving the script, and knowing each other better. We learned many things, useful and useless, from our cast. And we’re sure they did too. One thing that touched us a lot is how our cast was so supportive and creative during rehearsals. They sat through three-hour rehearsals just to speak ten lines. They gave us advice and suggestions to make the play better. They also thought about play-related tasks for which they were not responsible and reminded us about these many times. This lovely cast made our directing debuts better than we could have imagined.

      It was challenging for us to put this story on stage because of the way Eileen Chang writes. Somehow an enticing novel can be not so engaging when acted out in the theatre. We edited the novella with Lily and deleted some parts that were not very suitable for stage acting. Fortunately, the final script worked very well and each actor and actress was able to create a vivid figure on stage.

      We want to take this opportunity to thank Princeton Chinese Theatre for giving us such a beautiful opportunity and memory.

– Yifeng Wang and Peiwen Xu