From "Like a Dream" to "Once Upon a Time", how does Lai Shengchuan look at time

On the outer wall of Shanghai's "Upper Theater", there is a passage written by Shengchuan: "The absolute charm of the theater lies in its liveness." Its romance lies in the fact that it is the epitome of the ephemerality and impermanence of life. ”

Due to the impact of the epidemic, when the eighth Wuzhen Drama Festival opened this year, 731 days have passed since the previous one. Lai Shengchuan said: "We have not seen each other for more than 700 days, but our hearts have been in Wuzhen. When there is no it, it feels more needed. ”

The closing drama of this year's drama festival is Lai Shengchuan's "Once Upon a Time". The play is jointly performed by Hao Lei, Zhang Jie and the actors of the upper theater, which takes more than 6 hours to lead the audience to cross the Pacific Ocean from the mountains of Yunnan to Manhattan, the United States, and then to India to find the "pure land", and finally return to New York to complete a long journey.

Super long drama, circular stage, many people will think, "Once Upon a Time" is not the sister of "Like a Dream"? In an interview with this reporter, Lai Shengchuan agreed with the "sister work" statement, but also pointed out that there may be some inevitable comparisons in the "appearance" of the two plays, but the content is independent of each other.

One of the questions Lai Shengchuan often ponders is: What is time for theater creators?

Lai shengchuan said that he once watched a play adapted from Dickens's novel by the Royal Shakespeare Company in New York in the 1980s and 1990s. "6 hours and two nights to see if I can hold on." After watching it for two days, I was very happy and comfortable, and the audience felt as if they had accomplished something together, and there was a feeling of common progress, which was very enjoyable."

When creating "Like a Dream", Lai Shengchuan lamented that when the initial inspiration came, he wrote a 29-page outline that "could not be stopped". "I was shocked myself, and I was very happy later because I did it in school without any commercial restrictions and pressures." The only restriction others had on him at the time was that as long as the audience watched the play at night, he could still take public transportation home.

Lai Shengchuan confessed that he did not mean to create a very long play, but because the concept of "Like a Dream" and "Once Upon a Time" itself was very large.

"I always feel that, as creators, time is the clay we use for sculpture. This clay is relative, and when your play makes the audience feel long, 3 minutes can be like 3 hours. If the viewer can fit in, time doesn't exist and the clay disappears. Lai Shengchuan said.

China Youth Daily: Some viewers feel that "Once Was So" is like the sister article of "Like a Dream", what is the innovation of "Once Upon a Time"?

Lai Shengchuan: It is easy for the audience to associate "Once Upon a Time" and "Dream Like a Dream" because these two plays have two things in common. The first point is that there are auditoriums in the lotus pond, and the audience sits in the middle, and the play "goes around" in all directions, which is a way of creating "Like a Dream"; the second point is that "Once Upon a Time" is very long. In addition, the way the two plays start is also very similar, so it will make people feel like sisters. In my mind, it should also be regarded as a sister work, but no role in the two works is connected.

Many people who have seen "Once Upon a Time" have told me that I feel that some of the problems and ways of thinking it explore are even bigger than "Like a Dream". Some people say that watching "Like a Dream" has the passion of watching "King Lear", and watching "Once Upon a Time" is the tranquility of watching "The Tempest". I write different scripts at different ages, and of course my mood is different.

China Youth Daily: What impact will the epidemic have on the ecology of the Wuzhen Drama Festival and the drama itself?

Lai Shengchuan: I think everyone will cherish the drama performed live in the theater. Whether it's because of the pandemic or because the Internet is getting more and more developed, everyone is looking at their phones, and the more you enter your own little world, the more you feel how important it is to contact people. The experience of coming into contact with real people in large public places and seeing real people telling the stories of our real people is very precious. This time made me feel that we have not changed anything, and it is right to say the story of this era. The audience will naturally pour into the theater, and this will not change.

China Youth Daily: How do you see film and television stars entering the theater to perform dramatic works?

Lai Shengchuan: These are all processes, and what we care about is the soundness of this ecology. For me, if it is a star to play my work, the audience will see if he is incompetent and can stand up for that role, which is our standard. If he can't, then why would we ask him to play?

Like Ni Ni of "One Cave", everyone watches this play and forgets that she is a star, and the audience is watching a stage actor in a stage play, what a great actor! Our standards are clear and we will not deliberately manipulate this market.

China Youth Daily, China Youth Network: What is it like to participate in the reality show "Drama New Life", which moved the drama online, and this time the theater festival returned to offline performance?

Lai Shengchuan: The works of "New Life of Drama" are too peculiar and incredible. "Drama New Life" is different from ordinary variety shows, it does not have a sense of competition that "kills" each other, but encourages everyone to cooperate, and the result is such a wonderful work. Although we have not held a drama festival for two years, I appeared in Wuzhen when recording the program, and I felt that the connection with Wuzhen was still there. I told Huang Lei that these plays in the program must be invited to the drama festival. Although the audience has seen these works on the video platform, the shocking power is completely different from the scene.

China Youth Daily: This year, there are talk show actors who come to Wuzhen Drama Festival to perform repertoire, is this a kind of cross-border performance?

Lai Shengchuan: I don't think this can be regarded as a crossover, the package capacity of the drama is very large. We look at theatrical work from an artistic point of view, and if it were a purely entertaining commercial performance, we would not accept it. The first step we took this year was to start doing dance theater, which hadn't been there before. In the past, there was no opera and no dance in our drama festival, but now it is slowly beginning to have. Every year we "expand cautiously", but dare not expand too much.

China Youth Daily: Your works reflect the reflection on the times and society, can these works answer the questions raised in your heart?

Lai Shengchuan: For decades, I have been keeping my curiosity in making various new attempts, such as the "Lotus Pond" audience of "Like a Dream" and "Once Upon a Time", and everyone feels fresh. I wanted to return to something fundamental, and that was the ritualistic sense of theater. Why do humans have drama? It has to do with human rituals, with "healing."

The whole environment of "Like a Dream" and "Once Upon a Time" is very gorgeous and very diverse, but every scene is an actor telling a story to the audience, it is so simple. The charm and magic of the theater is also so simple, the most important element is the audience, is the imagination of the audience. You can drive the audience to think and feel something that he or she has not felt, and this is the true meaning of theater.

Author: Shen Jiequn

Source: China Youth Daily