The greater lessons of ‘Peach Blossom’

When will we be able to look at “exotic” performance and see intellectual content, rather than merely admiring the outer form? When will we understand that artists from “other” cultures are capable of creating meaningful as well as beautiful works? Until we do so, we infantilize Asian, African and other “non-Western” arts, denying them their rightful position in the adult world. And we deprive ourselves of a pathway into the minds of those “other” cultures with whom we exist in the real, very adult world -- whether as allies, partners or enemies.

Mark Swed’s review of Chen Shi-Zheng’s “Peach Blossom Fan” (“A Fresh Breeze From the East,” April 12) is a case in point. While appreciating the artistic skill of the production, he failed to perceive that this brilliantly reconceived adaptation carries meaningful, contemporary content.

Moreover, Swed demonstrated minimal understanding of Western theater by failing to note connections to Brechtian acting (with its inaccurate but pervasive “debt” to Chinese performance) and Genet’s poetic/grotesque brothel play “The Balcony.” He mistakenly refers to Japanese noh in Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures,” a work that skillfully fuses the Broadway musical with kabuki.

Swed applauds the visual style, maintaining that this “alluring Chinese wonderland ... with its fluttering peach blossom curtain, translucent glass floor and catwalk, wall of video projections and neon dragonfly, is worth the price of admission.” He suggests that “Broadway could learn a trick or two hundred from [the traditions of 400-year-old Chinese] kunqu,” and concludes that aspects of “this new theatrical laboratory” have “the potential to extend the life of the moribund musical.”

Doesn’t the assumption that artistic experiments with “non-Western” genres are valuable only if they help revive a dying Western theater sound a lot like the rationale for imperialism?

What Swed misses is the content. The play, like its 1699 original, is set primarily in a brothel in Nanjing, China. Japanese popular music plays. Overhead, a huge dragonfly is suspended, nose down, like a kamikaze airplane about to crash. Outside, a war is raging. Corrupt, greedy officials and a playwright-censor whose goal is “to keep power from harming my friends” put an impotent, puppet emperor on the throne, which is the dragonfly-airplane. The new emperor literally walks all over the whores’ backs on his way to the throne. Inside the brothel, a lovely young virgin loves a naive poet. She refuses the advances and jewels of corrupt officials, the playwright, even the emperor. She prefers death to life as a prostitute-concubine. The nation is overrun, the war ends in chaos, death and devastation. At the conclusion, the virgin’s ghost and her poet-lover have a brief moment, then fade away.

The locale of Nanjing, popular Japanese music and the dragonfly-kamikaze airplane/imperial throne suggest references to the early days of what became World War II. The Japanese Imperial Army invaded China, committing brutal acts of rape and mutilation, including what has been called the Rape of Nanjing. Women (or a helpless nation) became whores for (or collaborators with) the invaders; there was a puppet emperor.

But the Chinese Chen evokes more than China’s bitter past with Japan. It seems to me that he, playwright Edward Mast and lyricist-composer Stephin Merritt are also commenting directly on the present. The brutality of war, greed, the destruction of free speech, the prostitution of helpless women, the willingness to die for the purity of one’s beliefs, invasion and the imposition of usurping rulers -- these are all images from today’s news.

With postmodern irony, Brechtian devices, exotic references and the grotesque lyricism of Genet -- but without answers -- “Peach Blossom Fan” suggests the complex, compromised, confusing world in which we live today.