The Peony Pavilion
Tang's play diverges from the short story in that it integrates elements of the Ming dynasty, despite being set in the Southern Song.
The play was originally written for staging as Kunqu opera, one of the genres of traditional Chinese theatre arts.
Its author, Tang Xianzu, was one of the greatest dramatists and writers of the Ming dynasty, and The Peony Pavilion can be regarded as the most successful masterpiece of his life.
Both the play and its dramatist get a high reputation on Chinese and international stages, and the study of Tang Xianzu has become a popular subject today.
In that fateful dream, Liniang encounters a young scholar (identified later in the play as Liu Mengmei, whom in real life she has never met).
Recognizing that Du Bao's deceased daughter is the girl who appears in his dreams, Liu agrees to exhume Liniang's body upon her request and bring her back to life.
The disbelieving and furious Du Bao throws Liu Mengmei into prison for being a grave robber and an impostor.
In the first scene, there is a four-sentence introductory speech succinctly summarizing the main storyline: "Du Liniang draws a portrait true to life; Chen Zuiliang brings about the peace once more; Liu Mengmei meets his resurrected wife; Du Bao gives tortures to his son-in-law."
There are around 160 characters in the play, with 30 main characters,[2] including: Albeit conventional in its narrative structure, notably the deus ex machina ending, The Peony Pavilion is unique in its lyricism and its text is hailed as one of the high points of Chinese literature, featuring a body of refined and lavish lyrics.
Embellished and accentuated by the then still-developing Kun music, The Peony Pavilion's prosaic script agilely weaves a fabric of nuances and metaphors that seamlessly transgresses the divide between nature's beauty and man's inner cosmos of emotions and desires.
Embedded in the leisurely and undulant melodies of the Kun music, the lyrics of the opera promptly pitch the audience into a world created by a prosaic banquet of metaphors, an ecstatic dance of the imagination, and most importantly, an unfettered celebration of sensitivity.
The unfolding of the play leads the audience into the conviction that the daily life which they physically and temporally occupy bears little or no significance whereas the ultimate reality resides in the transcendental realm created by the play in which some of the most familiar conceptual dichotomies which fundamentally characterize the physical world and plague the human mind melt away.
In both the content of the script and the storyline of the play, the audience constantly runs into the obscuring of the objective nature and the subjective feelings of a person, the blurring of the divide between dream and reality that marks the romance between Du Liniang and Liu Mengmei, and the seemingly surreal interaction between the protagonists which transcends the hiatus between life and death and above all, the simultaneous presentation of the undying nature of beauty and its evanescent appearance.
Apparently Tang Xianzu, the author, is not attempting to resolve such conceptual dichotomies by reason but to present them as necessarily coexistent and the divide between which can and have to be traversed through a transcendental experience such as the one created by the play.
Underlying this construction of beauty and transcendence is Tang Xianzu's philosophical idea of '唯情', which advocates that the nature of a human being is NOT his position in the order of a certain grand scheme, be it the universe or a society as promoted by Neo Confucianism, but his individual sensitivity and emotions.
Therefore the solutions to the fundamental problems of man, the resolutions of the basic dichotomies that haunt his existence must be found in his sensitivity and feelings and not in reason.
It is in the transcendental experience that the play of the Peony Pavilion offers that one can find the final answer to his existential problems and therefore peace.
Due to the uniqueness of its lyrics, rhythm, and ancient style of prose, the translation became a daunting challenge for literature scholars and theatre practitioners.
Besides, recent adaptations have sought to inject new life, such as more accessible scripts for a modern audience, new choreography, or new theatrical technologies, into one of China's best-loved classical plays, but since such efforts have met with opposition from the Kun opera traditionalists, to a certain degree, some scholars seriously critique them.
The play was widely acclaimed by the public and critics when it was first presented onstage, and it is also regarded as the Chinese version of "Romeo and Juliet".
Subject/ theme on "uncovering social darkness and caring for people's sufferings", "qualities of heroism", "attacking feudalism and marriage system", "exposing the miserable fate of women" and "reflecting family and social ethics", etc., are generally discussed in ancient Chinese drama, which is also evident in The Peony Pavilion.
From the perspectives of psychoanalysis, the action of "A Walk in the Garden" is the awakening of Du Liniang's suppressed urges and unacknowledged emotions, while the scene of "A Surprising Dream" is exactly her fantasy of sexual satisfaction.
