Director’s Statement

Lily and Jasmine is a work by my junior undergraduate schoolmate, Ye Chenxi. We have never met. I came across this script through participating in the selection process for the script contest held by our school’s theater club. At that time, it was the beginning of the semester, and I was working as a producer for a short film for the semester. I was so busy that I could only read the scripts late at night. This script, on one extremely exhausted night, awakened me from the very beginning with its powerful poetry.

We live in an era where Chinese-language playwrights fear poetry. We have been indoctrinated with too many directives to "stay grounded," as if theater tickets priced at a hundred bucks or more are sold to reduce our literacy. But should theater really be like this? Why not acknowledge that film and television have long taken over the role of mass media from theater? Don't we know what kind of audience walks into the theater? Excluding philosophical thought and avoiding poetry — is it really for the audience's sake, or is it intellectuals’ evasion of their identity, as well as their responsibility in the audience and behind the scenes?

Thus, both philosophical thought and poetry have become luxuries that require courage. I consider myself a courageous playwright; Ye's writing shows even more courage and intellect than mine. Furthermore, although she views obscurity as her style, behind her obscure text lies a complete, compact, and clean dramatic structure that is akin to a fable. Looking at her text itself, is it truly the usually derogatory "obscure"? In her words, I see an endeavor to engage in critical thinking through the contemporary simplified Chinese language, without any superfluous pretense or the exotic flavor of the translated language. This is the most contemporary, decent Chinese, a kind of language for the stage that Chinese students studying abroad can articulate powerfully.

As a director, I am stubborn. The history of drama is vast; there are many masters. Only those texts that dare to take an uncanny path and rush to the extreme can strike me. If Oscar Wilde’s Salome once moved me with its dance of beauty, then the pursuit of meaning, and the firm "yes" placed at the endless horizon along this pursuit, is the shared resonance between Lily and Jasmine and me.

If ten years define a generation, we have had a whole generation before us to become disillusioned; it is time for a firm "yes." I believe this is the voice and path of our generation. Lily and Jasmine moves me with its language and its path.