Apart from being a world-renowned theatre artist, Lai is also an award-winning filmmaker, and a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism and has translated multiple books on the subject.

A prolific author of 40 original performed plays to date, Lai was also commissioned by the government of the Republic of China to work on a number of large-scale events in Taiwan.

Lai took on the position of General Consultant for the 2011 Taiwan Lantern Festival held in Miaoli County, attracting a whopping 8.02 million visitors.

China's prominent literary critic Yu Qiuyu says that Lai's work “always has the ability to touch the heartstrings of countless audiences.” [5] Lai's most famous works includes That Evening, We Performed Crosstalk (1985), which revived the dying art of "Crosstalk" in Taiwan; The Village (2008), described by the China Times as "a collectible treasure for our generation" and by the Beijing News as "The pinnacle of our era of theatre";[6] the 8 hour epic A Dream Like A Dream (2000), described by prominent theatre critic Raymond Zhou as "a major milestone in Chinese theater, possibly the greatest Chinese-language play since time immemorial";[7] and perhaps his best known play Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land (1986), described by the New York Times as "may be the most popular contemporary play in China…by the end, the audience is left to contemplate the burdens of memory, history, longing, love and the power of theater itself.

His epic 8 hour A Dream Like A Dream (2000), which has been compared to Peter Brook's Mahabharata, “may be the most cosmic piece of theater in the Chinese-language canon,"[9] revealing Buddhist and universal themes of suffering and recurring life cycles in a unique performance format devised by Lai that places the audience in the center of the space, with performance surrounding audience.

Aside from his creative bases in Shanghai and Taipei, Lai has been commissioned to create new works in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Beijing.

In 2009 Lai was also chief director of the Deaflympics Opening and Closing Ceremonies held in Taipei, which received high acclaim for their aesthetic beauty and representation of the deaf spirit.

Lai's main tool for playwriting in his earlier work is his use of improvisation in collaboration with the actors, which include many of the most respected names of the time.

This is a method he learned from his mentor Shireen Strooker of the Amsterdam Werkteater, and he is one of the world's foremost exponents of using improvisation as a creative tool.

Lai has also written and directed two widely acclaimed feature films, The Peach Blossom Land (1992) and The Red Lotus Society (1994).

Lai occasionally directs the works of others, including the Chinese language premiere of Angels in America, Part I, which he translated.

He has also directed innovative versions of Western classics, including an evening of Samuel Beckett plays in an ancient Chinese garden environment, Mozart’s operas Don Giovanni, Cosi fan tutte and The Marriage of Figaro, all set in Chinese backgrounds, in collaboration with Taiwan's National Symphony Orchestra.

His plays have been published in numerous Chinese editions in both Taiwan and China, as well as in English versions from Oxford and Columbia University Press.

Note: Lai's plays are often written in collaboration with his actors over a process of creative rehearsals which he initiates, structures and supervises, and is responsible for the original idea, the outline, and the writing of the final script.