The major contemporary Asian playwright of his time, perhaps of all time.

Stan Lai is the most important contemporary playwright in the Chinese-speaking world. Many of his plays are household names, known for their inventiveness, depth, and imagination. With its beautiful English translations and superb, digestible introductions by Tao Qingmei, this collection is essential reading for everyone interested in contemporary theatre today.

Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land, by the playwright and director Stan Lai, may be the most popular contemporary play in China . . . By the end, Jiang finds Yun, and the laughter gives way to sobs as the audience is left to contemplate the burdens of memory, history, longing, love, and the power of theatre itself.

I was fortunate to see the original production of I Me She Him in Taipei in 1998, and reading Stan Lai's own translation of his play aroused wonderful memories and new insights. This long-awaited anthology opens the work of a playwright of worldwide significance, but not worldwide access, to English-speaking readers.

The University of Michigan Press has published another milestone book in the history of world theatre! Not only is Stan Lai one of the most important playwrights in the Chinese and Sinophone cultures, but he is also essential in understanding the beauty, potential, contradiction, and complexity in human conditions magnificently expressed in theatre. A must read for all interested in drama, history, society, and the arts.

The God of Laughter reigns over Lai's Taiwan/PRC crosstalk yielding gnosis born of multigenerational traumas. In crisp dialogue and clear introductions, international readers find all needed to understand the complex literary references, mysticisms, and vexed politics of China and Taiwan as we savor tales of family trauma, corporate greed, and youthful idealism born of the Chinese experience, but resonating far beyond.

Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land has been described as 'tragedy and comedy side by side on stage, in plays within a play, with classic and modern intersecting in themes of waiting and searching.' It goes far beyond this, practically employing all the dramatic devices of Western modernism, plus postmodernism. Brecht, Stanislavski, and Mei Lan-fang are all represented here, but what is exemplary is that it is diverse yet not scattered, everything in its proper place. In other postmodernist collage theatre pieces, diversity creates chaos, toward the purpose of deconstruction. In Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land, the collage created by placing the two plays Secret Love and Peach Blossom Land next to each other creates, on the other hand, a marvelous synthesis . . . Here the theories of Chinese poetry and Chinese theatre poems give deeper meaning to the postmodern term 'collage,' rather than simply pirating the use of the device.

"Stan Lai's significance to Sinophone theatre cannot be overstated, and the availability of a dozen of his plays in lively, accessible translations is a gift to English-speaking artists, scholars, and audiences."