Taiwanese Troupe Shares Its Global Vision : Theater: Performance Workshop brings Chinese-language ‘Red Sky’ to Irvine. The universal theme of aging is delivered in English supertitles.

You’re going to die. With luck, you might also get old.

That’s clear whether you live in Orange County or Taiwan, and it’s the subject of “Red Sky,” tonight and Saturday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre. While the Taiwan-based Performance Workshop previously has sold out productions in Orange County to Chinese-speaking audiences, this time the group will use English supertitles.

As recently as January, PW director Stan Lai said he was “dead set” against translation.

“We thought our work was geared to Chinese-speaking people,” he said this week on the phone from San Diego, where the troupe was appearing. “But seeing how our films have been received at international festivals, we realized that we’ve always had something to say to a wider audience.

“We know now that we can be a window to something meaningful in Berlin and New York as well as Taiwan. Our vision is becoming more global.”

PW’s tour began in New York on Nov. 17 and has included stops in San Francisco and Los Angeles. The performances here are being sponsored by a nonprofit organization, Bravi 9.

According to Lai, the title “Red Sky” refers to the last light of day (the production is in fact adapted loosely from “Twilight” by Shireen Strooker of Amsterdam Worktheater). All Performance Workshop plays are based on improvisation, and Lai’s actors visited Taiwan’s senior citizen centers to better understand a sector of society that only recently is emerging.

“Old people’s homes are actually quite new in Taiwan,” Lai noted. “In our society you’re supposed to take care of your elderly--to send someone to an old people’s home is quite disgraceful. But people are doing it, and to me that is an indication that something is falling apart in the fabric of our society. Here, of course, that is fairly normal.

“But the play is not meant to be a sermon. It’s a poem. It’s full of life, and full of laughter. In California more than anywhere else, people have been laughing heartily.”

The actors in “Red Sky” use no makeup. Given the topic, “this is key,” Lai said. “It creates an interesting dynamic: The audience is watching a young person, and only through the acting powers are they seeing old people. So there’s a distance, a moving in and moving out, that heightens awareness (regarding death and dying) by allowing you to see two perspectives.

“When you’re young, for instance, you don’t think about it, and when you’re old you don’t want to talk about it.”

Having spent a great deal of time in both Taiwan and the United States, Lai has a dual perspective on the theater scene here. He was born in Washington, but has been based in Taiwan since he was 12. He earned his Ph.D. in dramatic art at UC Berkeley, then formed Performance Workshop in Taiwan in 1984.

“Politics and the arts always move together,” he said. “So it’s interesting to me that the biggest issue here recently was Proposition 187, yet nothing has been done artistically about it. If 187 happened in Taiwan, we’d have produced something.”

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Artistically, he said, “America chokes itself with economic restrictions. You need X amount of dollars to do (elaborate) sets and to deal with unions. . . . If you had a dynamite group with something to say that doesn’t feel it has to work in big places like the Orange County Performing Arts Center, you’d have something. But here the urge to express yourself is more tied in with the urge to be seen.

“That doesn’t make for very good creative work. It creates Hollywood, that’s for sure, and a lot of dull theater--theater that’s done because there must be a season.”

* Bravi 9 presents Performance Workshop in “Red Sky,” in Chinese with English supertitles, tonight and Saturday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. 8 p.m. $15 to $40. (714) 854-4646.