The Garden of Flowing Fragrance at The Huntington is the inspiration for playwright Stan Lai’s new site- specific work, “Nightwalk in the Chinese Garden,” which will have its world premiere Sept. 21–Oct. 26, 2018. Photo by Martha Benedict. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

In practice, site-specific theatre is often a utilitarian practice whose parents are necessity and opportunity: the pressing need for theatre artists to create and the gracious offering of space to do so.

In the hands of a master storyteller given sufficient time and inspiration site-specific becomes an elevated form. One that weaves story and space together in a tapestry that could occur in no other place on Earth and have the same impact. This type of site-specific work is all too rare, which makes Nightwalk in the Chinese Garden — currently enjoying a sold out run at the The Huntington Botanical Garden — so special.

Jessika Van as the Maiden, Chenxue Luo as the Opera Singer, and Christine Lin as Fragrance. Photo by Rafael Hernandez. Courtesy of CalArts Center for New Performance.

Writer/director Stan Lai, who the BBC has called “the best Chinese language playwright and director in the world,” has crafted a masterwork of play structure that melds the history of the Huntington, techniques from Chinese opera, the stunning landscape of the titular Chinese Garden, and a twin interleaved stories based on the 16th-Century romantic tragicomedy The Peony Pavilion. “Masterwork” gets bandied about somewhat without care in the Southland’s theatrical landscape, but Lai’s alchemy blends these elements of contrasting tones and techniques into a singular theatrical alloy, creating an experience that could only work to its fullest in the garden at night.

The twin stories follow two doomed romances. One is between a maiden (Jessika Van, the emotional bedrock of the piece) and a scholar (Hao Feng) in 16th-Century China. The other is that of an artist (Peter Mark) and the ghost of a girl who died of a broken heart (Lizinke Kruger) in railroad baron era California.

Sarah Schulte as the Curator, Adam J. Smith as Mr. Huntington, and Lizinke Kruger as Bella. Photo by Rafael Hernandez. Courtesy of CalArts Center for New Performance.

At the beginning of the play the audience is divided into two groups, with one group assigned to tour the garden clockwise and the other widdershins. Each group will see all the scenes in the play, but their path determines the order. Lai uses a palindrome structure — with each of the romances playing forward for one group, and backwards for the next. In my case I saw the California story “forwards” and the Chinese story in reverse. Both stories come together in a “show within a show” in the center of the play, and elements of one story echo and resolve themselves in their mirror images.

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It’s a delicate structure that in the hands of a lesser playwright would fall apart. As it stands Lai’s work recalls both Shakespeare and Stoppard (specifically Arcadia, my favorite play) in terms of technique and in the case of the former the occasional homage. Then he pushes past those two fixed points in the Western canon and creates something that melds a deep love of two places — China and California — together in a seamless whole.

Hao Feng as the Playwright, Jessika Van as the Maiden, and Reggie Yip as the Maid. Photo by Rafael Hernandez. Courtesy of CalArts Center for New Performance.

While a couple of the actors are a bit green — this is a production that puts grad students in the mix — the sheer strength of the material itself carries the night.

So much of American culture at the moment is concerned with staying in its own lane. Multiculturalism is viewed with disdain on the right and suspicion on the left. Yet in Lai’s hands the interleaving of time, space, and cultures remind us that our worlds aren’t so far apart. That in the space between where our dreams form and daybreak we are granted a glimpse of what it means to be human, no matter where we hail from.

I couldn’t help but think as I left the garden to stroll back in the darkness to my car that this kind of project couldn’t be initiated in this day and age. Lai and CalArts began the process of developing Nightwalk some years ago, and since then the political conditions in America have altered our relationship to China in ways it may take years to come back from. The truth is that our societies are too intertwined to be fully severed from each other economically and politically. The question is will we continue to enjoy the benefits of cultural exchange that allow the people of America and China to enjoy the threads that bind us in one larger human story, or if we’re doomed to look on the brief moment when we could as a fleeting dream of Spring.

Nightwalk in the Chinese Garden plays through October 26th at The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino. The production is currently sold out.

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