Though he's reluctant to be called a master, Taiwanese playwright and theater director Stan Lai (Lai Shengchuan) can't shake the title, especially after the BBC called him "probably the best Chinese-language playwright and actor in the world."

One of the most prominent voices in China's modern drama, Lai has become an icon to many Chinese theater professionals and theatergoers, with about 30 original plays to his name. His signature work, the 1986 play "Secret Love In Peach Blossom Land," has been performed more than a hundred times around the world, probably the most popular modern Chinese play in history.

"We live in a great era with fast changes every day, and our job is to record the era. We are not historians, but one of drama's purposes is to remember," Lai told an audience at an art salon in Shanghai last week.

He was in town for a three-day master class, sharing his experiences with 30 professionals, including performers, directors, critics and theater managers from Shanghai, Taipei, Sichuan Province and Sweden. Afterward, he delivered a three-hour "commencement" address about the state of theater, frequently interrupted by applause.

"I don't want to create a lot of Stan Lais through such training. I just hope to help our society bring up many talents who will be creative thinkers in the culture industry," said Lai.

Dressed in faded blue jeans and casual coat, Lai with a goatee and shoulder-length gray hair, spoke in an amiable and easy-to-understand way, without jargon or pretension.

"What kind of theater do we need?" was the organizer's suggested title of Lai's speech.
"I don't know," Lai said at the outset of his talk, saying theater culture is so diverse that everybody has his or her own ideas about an idea.

"I don't think I'm qualified to define what kind of theater we need, but I'd like to discuss the question," he said, and went on to discuss commercialism and art, elite and popular drama, development of creative art in China and other subjects.

One of the world's most celebrated Chinese-language playwrights and theater directors, Stan Lai is always pushing creative frontiers and staging innovations. Xia Ruirui listens to the master.

Lai is also a long-time teacher and the author of an innovative study on creativity titled "Stan Lai on Creativity" (2006), in which he argues that creativity can be taught with the proper methods.

"There are two types of motivation in art reproduction - self-regard and altruism - and I prefer the latter," Lai told the Shanghai art salon, referring to creating high-quality theater. "If the main reason behind an art creation is money, it won't be true art. As long as the audience likes my works, they don't need to know my name and I also don't care how big the stage is."

Regarded as a living legend in Chinese theater, Taipei-based Lai is closely associated with the history of Taiwan's modern drama.

Born in 1954 in Washington, DC, the son of a Taiwanese diplomat, Lai was received West-meets-East education. After graduating from Taiwan's Fu Jen Catholic University with an English literature degree, he went to the US with his wife and earned his PhD in dramatic art from University of California at Berkeley in 1983.

In college, he started to play music and write novels and plays, all fueling his desire to create dramatic art. He sought professional training at UC Berkeley.

One of the goals of the UC Berkeley program is to incubate "academic directors," trained in both academic research and theater practice.

Lai had nine classmates in his first semester, but only Lai and one other student survived the five years to receive a PhD, Lai said in a previous interview.

Carrying a dream of the possibilities of dramatic arts, Lai returned to Taiwan after graduation to establish a "modern theater" to express his own voice. The island had no tradition of or foundation for modern theater, so Lai became a pioneer.

Lai started his pilot project in Taipei National University of the Arts to teach young people a new approach to theater arts. The first group of students at the newly built College of Theater produced Taiwan's first native pioneering dramatic works. Since then, Lai emerged as one of the most influential forces in modern Chinese-language theater.

In 1984, Lai and his wife Ding Nai-chu, who is a well-known actress and theater director, founded the Performance Workshop that became one of the most celebrated in the Chinese stage. According to the Singapore-based United Daily News, Lai's Performance Workshop "created a brand-new tragicomic experience for world Chinese-language theater."

However, for Lai, the workshop was more like a baby who was due when his students improvisational abilities matured. "When we applied to register the Performance Workshop with local authorities, they told us 'You should have a more specific name,' like you couldn't name a newspaper 'Newspaper.' The reason I chose this common name for our theater is because I want it to be open and have with the most possibilities," Lai told the Shanghai salon.

In addition to "Secret Love In Peach Blossom Land" (two plays struggle for place on the same stage), one of the most memorable works of the contemporary Chinese theater, the workshop's "crosstalk series" is also very popular. Critics say it has virtually forged a new theatrical genre.

The crosstalk or xiangsheng plays, based on traditional comedic dialogue, began in 1985 with the ground-breaking "That Evening, We Performed Xiangsheng." The series helped resuscitate the dying traditional art form, typically rapid-fire exchanges between two actors.

"The crosstalk plays were staged like an elegy for the traditional art, which used to be very popular among ordinary Chinese. We found so many traditions suddenly disappear or are on the brink of extinction under rapid economic development," Lai told the Shanghai audience. He said he never expected it would be so successful and influence Taiwan's crosstalk revival.

His latest work is "Crosstalk Travelers," a collaboration between Lai and Taiwan TV producer Wang Wei-chung, which was performed in Shanghai late last month. It's the seventh in the crosstalk series and features stories involving two actors who travel across a dozen countries. It's more lighthearted and funnier than other plays in the series.

While trying to preserve tradition through innovation, Lai also made a bold approach to the experimental dramatic art with a symbolic, eight-hour epic "A Dream Like A Dream."

Produced in 2000, the work features a specially designed stage and seating - the audience sits in a square central pit and watches the actors perform on four sides surrounding them.

"The very special design makes staging the play very demanding for a theater," Lai said, adding that it is seldom performed outside Taipei.

"But we will redo the play next year and bring it to Shanghai in early 2013," he revealed in Shanghai.

He said Shanghai's theatrical arts market is quite mature but there's more room for development in the metropolis that welcomes so many tourists from around the world.

"One of the most important things is to encourage more original scripts which draw inspirations from our real life. Only the original creations can strike a chord with audiences, " Lai told the salon.

For many people, life is like a drama with highs and lows, while for Lai, maybe drama is more like life with so much honesty and emotion.

"The purpose of drama," he said, "is to remember those who need to be remembered."