| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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Following Patient No. 5’s journey, the audience gradually understands the whole Mandalian life journey as a dream within a dream. This concept is similar to the Spanish playwright Cadelon’s play Life is Like a Dream. In the end, Patient No. 5, as well as the audience, finally realizes that in his previous life he was Henry, the husband of Gu. His strange illness and potentially fatal fever were due to the unresolved enmity between Gu and himself. Before Gu died, she looked at Patient No. 5 to express reconciliation, and the hostilities of more than eighty years, across two life cycles, were eventually resolved through forgiveness.
Gu’s lines in the script point to Patient No. 5’s previous life and suggest that fate brought them together to resolve the enmities of their past lives. However, Lai also helps the audience achieve this understanding by deploying an artful mise-en-scéne. In this scene, Lai juxtaposes three hospital beds on stage (the dying Gu in the center, flanked on either side by Henry and Patient No. 5). The other characters listen to them as they head towards their imminent deaths. Patient No. 5 listens to Gu’s stories before she dies Henry’s African wife, whom he married after he left Gu, and his twin daughters are to his right, and on the left, the female doctor listens to Patient No. 5 narrate his long story which includes Gu’s stories. This is a simple but ingenious stage design to represent the notion of a story-within-a-story with several players playing the same role.
As Elin Diamond points out, performances represent the cultural politics as well as the terminology of “re” in the repetition of performances. By applying Diamond’s “re” critiques to Lai’s production of A Dream Like a Dream, we understand Lai’s desire to repeat the life cycles so that he can signify certain historical events.
Lai employs the theater in the”Surround” in this performance, which also represents the Buddhist wheel of time, in synchronization with the life cycles. In A Dream Like a Dream, these are the dreams of enmities and fantasies. The character Jiang Hong describes how confused she is, as she cannot discern whether an ordinary event is part of her real life or just another dream.