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These performances, such as the one by Peter Sellars have generally staged only the differences between the traditions of Chinese Opera and Western Realism. Yet Dr. Tuan introduces a witty, feminist intervention into the classic to the attention of the reader. The woman director, Dai Chun-fang has reversed the kind of cross-gender casting used in the Chinese Opera, to cast a woman in the role of the man. This leads Tuan into a theoretical discussion of gender masquerade through several texts, illuminating how gender identification and sexual orientation are linked.
In addition to the feminist critique, the book offers an incisive overview of intercultural production. Tuan tests the major arguments within the postcolonial, intercultural debates, discussing the ideas and stage practices of such leading thinkers as Rustom Bharucha and Richard Schechner. By moving through alternative Taiwanese stagings of Western classics such as Oedipus, Antigone and the Oresteia, Tuan reveals how Western directors working Taiwan, local feminist revisions, and Taiwanese ethnic practices both inherit and disturb the Western canon. She traces how eminent Western directors invited to work in Taiwan produce a lasting inheritance of colonial cultural production and how Taiwanese artists must wrestle with this infl uence. Finally, after successfully troubling the notion of intercultural theater, and revealing its contested genealogy, Tuan brings us to the hybrid staging of Taiwan’s most famous director and auteur, Stan Lai. Lai studied in the U.S. and then returned to Taiwan to found one of the most infl uential theaters and training programs there. Tuan leads us through the major productions by Lai that beg the transnational differences among various Chinese and U.S. cultural forms. With resonant titles like Journey to the West, Lai’s productions take on the major intellectual, social, economic, and formal infl uences that cross the Taiwanese culture, such as Buddhism, capitalism, folk traditions, capitalist marketing, immigration, and colonization. In a helpful blend of theory and practice, Dr. Tuan evokes Franz Fanon to interpret the monkey king, the comparative prices for military weapons from the U.S. and China to the journey of a single man, and Zen philosophy in the construction of a character’s struggle for identity.