Their play Secret Love for the Peach Blossom Spring is a perfect case in point.

When this veteran piece from six years ago was revived last September with Golden Horse award winner Lin Ching-hsia as a guest star, it made such a splash that even President Lee headed off to the theater to have a look.

At end of the year, the play was taken on a tour of three major U.S. cities and then to Hong Kong, where the company took part in the first Chinese Theatrical Arts Festival, competing against troupes from Hong Kong and the mainland. In early January, Artistic Director Stan Lai picked up the director's megaphone for the first time and started making the film version. The fashionwear firm formed by Ding Nai-chu, who is Lai's wife and the company's producer, along with costume designer Huang Chia-chun set a precedent for the theater some time ago by coming out with a leisurewear series based on concepts from the company's plays. Their slogan: "Clothe yourself in culture."

Starting Up a Fad: The Performance Workshop has long commanded an indisputable position in Taiwan theater, and it keeps on broadening its horizons and raising its sights. Its debut piece of seven years ago, The Other Evening We Performed Hsiang-sheng, set off a rarely seen craze for the theater, with live cassette recordings other show for sale on every street corner, and led to a revival of hsiang-sheng, or traditional comic dialogue. Their second play, Secret Love for the Peach Blossom Spring, was so popular that scalped tickets are said to have fetched NT$2000 apiece. Later plays, like Circle Story, The Island and the Other Shore, Look Who's Cross-Talking Tonight and Strange Tales of Taiwan, all set record runs at the box office and are still recalled with fervor by theatergoers today.

Considered from the angle of its operations, the Performance Workshop has been certainly been blessed.

First, even though it's run on an amateur basis, the company is thoroughly professional in quality. Artistic Director Stan Lai holds a doctorate in theater from the University of California at Berkeley and is chairman of the drama department and president of the graduate school at the National Institute of the Arts. Core members include veteran stage performers like Li Li-chun and Chin Shih-chieh as well as newcomers he trained at the academy like Chen Ming-tsai and Chen Li-hua, who have already directed a couple of plays of their own, A Post-Martial Law Couple and Yesterday Today. They're strong on diversifying operations: Even after a play has finished its run, you can still listen to it on cassette or CD or resavor the script in a finely bound volume, and T-shirts and backpacks proclaiming "Performance Workshop" are glimpsed in city crowds now and then, providing a fine model of "fusing art with popular culture."

Playing for Keeps: Second, the Performance Workshop doesn't face the pressure that a professional company does simply to survive. Its members all have their own jobs, and they put on a play only when the spirit moves them. Nonetheless, they've kept up a production ratio of two plays a year and have won long-term support from Cathay Pacific Airlines. In line with Stan Lai's hope that "the people I work with can all be my friends," they create by the method of group improvisation, which relies on smooth chemistry and tacit understanding. Their rehearsals are a bit like a game played by expert professionals, and when they decide they can "play for keeps," the scene is ready.

Their most unforgettable rehearsals were the ones for the revival of Secret Love for the Peach Blossom Spring, they say. There was a lot of pressure on them since the first run had been such a hit. "We rehearsed in Yangmingshan that winter and we'd eat a midnight snack while we were at it. There was such a family feeling about it." The play was a smash hit, but that's the memory they cherish most.

Where does so much stage magic come from, you may wonder. "They put on good shows" and "they appeal to all tastes" are the most direct answers. The actors can act, the scripts have substance, the set design is appealing, and the whole performance is professional from start to finish. There's something else, too: "They really are funny." They're clever at taking off on social tends and hot topics in the news, and the satire is so hilarious that constant laughter becomes the best applause.

Li Li-chun remembers how he felt wave after wave of laughter roll over him when they put on The Other Evening We Performed Hsiang-sheng at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall and had to steady himself so he wouldn't be bowled over. Stan Lai once saw a member of the audience at Secret Love for the Peach Blossom Spring fall to the floor with laughter and roll around in stitches. And one fan who has listened to the tape of Hsiang-sheng so often he can recite the lines backwards and forwards still cracks up every time he hears it.

Ukiyoe Surrealism: Behind this irresistible storm of laughter lies food for thought, provoking the audience, once its guard is down, to think about national affairs, about the meaning of being Chinese and even about Buddhist philosophy, mixing the frivolous with the weighty, the comic with the pathetic. And since the plays offer such a medley of material, each member of the audience comes away with something different.

Film critic and dramatist Huang Chien-yeh lauds Stan Lai as an intelligent, expert creator with a strong sense of the social pulse who is a master at handling transitions, at propelling the action forward and at providing an abundance of content in a tightly knit structure. However, he only touches on the surface and reins himself in, stopping at a cheerful and upbeat level before delving into deeper concerns. "Actually, what makes him really remarkable is a sensibility that makes the plays exude a kind of bizarre surrealism like the enhancements of a ukiyoe print," Huang says. For most theatergoers, the plays of the Performance Workshop are bitingly satirical, castigating and mocking at the foibles of the times, and fit in closely with current attitudes and ways of thinking on Taiwan. Since the topics are of such immediate concern, novelist and scriptwriter Chu Tien-wen says their performances have become "a social activity for gaining a sense of involvement and belonging." Their recent play Strange Tales of Taiwan was seen by some critics as coming from the same mold as the engag? film A Brighter Summer Day.

Then there are those harshly judgmental types in "little theater" who feel the groups like Ping-Fong Acting Troupe and the Performance Workshop are practically commercial in nature and that they make use of superficial political clich?s and catchwords to create an "overripe, saturated urban space" that's pretty to look at and easy to digest but lacking in substance.

For Lai himself, his plays are expressions of the high energy level of Taiwan in the 1980s, a time of social transition that provided endless material for creativity because of the clear clash between the old and the new. As for the interlaced plots and multiple staging that frequently appear in the plays, "those were inspired by contemporary life--it's hard for modern-day people to stick with anything all the way from start to finish, isn't it?"

Searching for an Image: No matter how popular his plays may be, Lai still seems to hint with a sigh that real appreciation is hard to come by, saying things like "it's pitiful how few reviews we get," or "it's weird, but I think foreigners actually understand us better."

How's that again? The Far Eastern Economic Review hailed the Performance Workshop as providing "the most exciting theater in the Chinese-speaking world," and Newsweek cited its performances as "the most recent piece of evidence that Taiwan is creating the boldest Chinese art in Asia today."

"Some foreign critics say that the common theme of our plays is the search for an image of ourselves. Maybe that's what we're unconsciously looking for."

Expanding their horizons to other Chinese communities around the world, the Performance Workshop has made several tours overseas, gaining stimulation from different areas and evoking responses in different audiences, something that Taiwan audiences, snug in their own little world, may not be aware of.

The first piece they took abroad was The Island and the Other Shore, which they performed in Singapore two years ago at the invitation of the Practice Performance Group. "We were nervous about performing," Lai recalls, "because Mandarin isn't used all that much there, as you know, and we were afraid they wouldn't be interested in the subject, which switches back and forth across the Taiwan Strait." To their surprise, the audience was enthusiastic in the extreme.

To Singaporeans, who view the goings-on between Taiwan and the mainland with eyes of cool detachment, the play was something else again altogether. And the play's leaping about in time and space, with its nonchalant yet affectionate attachment to Chinese culture, was "profound and mysterious" to Singaporeans, who "have no cultural or ancestral baggage and only care about living in the here and now." Kuo Pao-kun, artistic director of the Practice Performance Group, sums up the audience as "practical people watching an abstruse play, and what practical people need in their life is a little more spirituality anyway."

Secret Cultural Code: The Other Evening, We Performed Hsiang-sheng was taken to singapore at the end of 1990 and then, under the auspices of New Aspect Promotion Corp., to the Hong Kong Cultural Center, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

"After we performed in Hong Kong, there were nonstop reviews for a month asking when they'd ever be able to create a piece of hsiang-sheng (comic dialogue) like that," Ding Nai-chu says with a laugh. Not only did the show enable people in Hong Kong to learn more about us through the theater, its wide-open critical stance made many people feel that Taiwan must be a wonderful place to allow such freewheeling political satire.

Chinese Americans had yet another response. Thanks to widely disseminated information and the fact that many of them are recent immigrants from Taiwan, they managed to get most of the play's topical jokes, political criticism and social irony. Some had listened to the tape at home and had practically memorized the lines. When they went to see the show, they were like aficionados of Peking opera who recite lines to the actors before they say them.

Yao Shu-hua, associate director of the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, swears it's the truth: "There were only three people on stage, but the laughter kept up constantly. It was really surprising, because it's tougher to make an audience laugh than cry." In addition to having clever scripts and talented actors, the Performance Workshop offers plays with rich "cultural resonance" and expresses the voice of a generation, which works like a code to evoke a response. And their method of putting comic dialogue on a new path is similar to the way vaudeville was given new life in the United States a decade ago as "vaudeville nouveau." It's part of a worldwide trend.

Their latest tour, with Secret Love for the Peach Blossom Spring, "was praised all-round in California. It was just like going home." In New York, the Chiao Pao newspaper said the whole show was no whit inferior to Broadway, that the humor and cultural depth--the allusions to A Record of Peachblossom Spring and the stage business of Peking opera--made it a genuine Chinese dish, "the best recipe for letting Chinese theater takes its place on the world stage." "Hong Kong was the toughest," Lai says. Asked why, he ponders for a while. "That's another Chinese society, and they watch us carefully and dispassionately. But the reviews this time mostly focused on talking about Lin Ching-hsia's stage debut." The implication is the response was not as good as had been expected.

Shuttling Between East and West: Generally speaking, overseas Chinese and foreign reviewers are better at sensing how Lai's work constantly points to the search for an image by today's Chinese, and at the confrontation of tradition vs. modernity, Taiwan vs. the mainland and China vs. the West.

"There is a contradiction lite that in my background," Lai says. He was born in Washington, D.C., and forced by his father, who was a diplomat, to study Chinese when he was little. He had to practice writing with a brush pen, holding an egg to improve his grip, when he wanted to watch football, and he thought it was a lot of trouble. His family moved back to Taiwan when he was 12. He graduated in English from Fu Jen Catholic University, went to the United States for graduate school and then came back to Taiwan.

Shuttling back and forth between East and West must have produced a lot of conflict."It's all right. I'm very clear about where I'm at. I don't have any so-called identity problems." In fact, it's made it easier for him to step outside himself and see the big picture. "When I'm traveling abroad, I can see the world through the eyes of a Chinese, and when I'm here I can see Taiwan with the eyes of a foreigner."

At a deeper level, "Buddhism gives me strength." Lai and his wife are adherents of Tibetan Buddhism. They have a big meditation room at home filled with Buddhist statues and religious paraphernalia. It's a stopover for many visiting lamas. "To put it at the most basic, at the 'kindergarten' level, the West tells us to think about the world and deal with it in all its diversity, while Buddhism teaches us to attribute the diversity of the world to our hearts and minds, and to start by understanding ourselves," he placidly expounds.

In The Island and the Other Shore, for instance, the plot moves from simplicity to complexity and then back again. The chaotic world of kung-fu swashbucklers created by the novelist is a reflection of his inner turmoil. When the swashbuckler protagonist awakes and tries to return to the world of his dreams, he finds that he himself was once really a part of it. Was it a dream or not? Reality and fantasy are mixed together, and life has no single true face. The writer Lin Ching-hsuan says he gained a sense of freedom and mutability from the play and that what it's basically about is that "finding one's place in life is a question of finding spiritual peace."

Strange Tales of Taiwan, a comic monologue about environmental problems, illustrates the spiritual confusion of people today. "What it's ultimately about is an idea," Lai says. "We can't have a clean world around us unless we're clean on the inside. The filth on the outside is just an accumulation of rubbish inside."

Linking Up with Tomorrow: Linking up social satire to affairs of state to ultimate religious questions, "our plays aren't easy to review," Lai says with a meaningful smile.

The rise of the Performance Workshop last decade, in tandem with threlaxation of the political atmosphere, stirred up theater on Taiwan, spurred the birth of new companies, caused old companies like Lan Ling and Notebook to redefine themselves and drew in large crowds. As Taiwan advances in the 1990s, what sort of new work will the company come up with? How will film versions of its plays turn out? And what new advances will it make on the world stage? The answers, which remain to be seen, are awaited with anticipation.

[Picture Caption]

The Performance Workshop, with its talented roster, has come out with a string of creative successes ever since 1984 and become a sterling name in Taiwan theater.

Carrying on with the verbal experimentation of The Other Evening We Performed Hsiang-sheng, Look Who's Cross-Talking Tonight, whose subject matter touched on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, was a hit on its tour of Singapore, Hong Kong and the United States. (photo courtesy of Perfor mance Workshop)

In Strange Tales of Taiwan, a comic monologue designed to blaze a new trail for Taiwan comedy, a TV wall was used so Li Li-chun could "cross talk" with himself.

Shuang, the T-shirt says: "Have a blast." The slogan is practically a Workshop trademark. (photo by Diago Chiu)

The opera Journey to the West, which Stan Lai produced on commission for the National Theater, was cited by Newsweek as "the most recent piece of evidence that Taiwan is creating the boldest Chinese art in Asia today." (photo courtesy of Performance Workshop)

Hospitalization Is a Must, the inspiration for which came from a foreign script, is about the conflict between a person's inner self and outer surroundings. (photo courtesy of Performance Workshop)

Golden horse award winner Lin Ching-hsia was the guest star in last year's hit revival of Secret Love for the Peach Blossom spring.

A mixture of true and false, reality and fiction, The Island and the Other Shore led people to explore the meaning of life. (photo courtesy of Per formance Workshop)

Stan Lai is taking Secret Love for the Peach Blossom Spring from stage to screen. Just how well will the film version turn out?

Stage couple Stan Lai and Ding Nai-chu work together as a perfect match in holding up the Workshop's two chief pillars of creative work and business management.

Carrying on with the verbal experimentation of The Other Evening We Performed Hsiang-sheng, Look Who's Cross-Talking Tonight, whose subject matter touched on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, was a hit on its tour of Singapore, Hong Kong and the United States. （photo courtesy of Perfor mance Workshop）

In Strange Tales of Taiwan, a comic monologue designed to blaze a new trail for Taiwan comedy, a TV wall was used so Li Li-chun could "cross talk" with himself.

Shuang, the T-shirt says: "Have a blast." The slogan is practically a Workshop trademark. （photo by Diago Chiu）

The opera Journey to the West, which Stan Lai produced on commission for the National Theater, was cited by Newsweek as "the most recent piece of evidence that Taiwan is creating the boldest Chinese art in Asia today." （photo courtesy of Performance Workshop）

Hospitalization Is a Must, the inspiration for which came from a foreign script, is about the conflict between a person's inner self and outer surroundings. （photo courtesy of Performance Workshop）

Golden horse award winner Lin Ching-hsia was the guest star in last year's hit revival of Secret Love for the Peach Blossom spring.

A mixture of true and false, reality and fiction, The Island and the Other Shore led people to explore the meaning of life. （photo courtesy of Per formance Workshop）

Stan Lai is taking Secret Love for the Peach Blossom Spring from stage to screen. Just how well will the film version turn out?

Stage couple Stan Lai and Ding Nai-chu work together as a perfect match in holding up the Workshop's two chief pillars of creative work and business management.