Talk About a Global Epic

This is the saga of “The Peony Pavilion.”

It begins with two competing American producers, who each plan to stage this classic Chinese opera in the West--one of them L.A.’s own perpetual enfant terrible Peter Sellars.

Along the way, it links Henry Kissinger, three leading Chinese artistic emigres, a host of craftspeople and performers, and two formidable retired divas, Beverly Sills, and from the world of Peking opera, Ma Bomin, who now rules all Shanghai culture.

In the end, only one Western production survives--at least for now.

“Mundan Ting”--”The Peony Pavilion”--is a masterpiece of China’s kunju opera tradition, a style native to Shanghai, older than the more famous Peking opera and thought to be more refined and lyrical. Performed complete, it’s 22 hours long; it was written by poet and playwright Tang Xianzu in 1598, when Shakespeare was starting his career in England and Monteverdi was writing the first important Western operas in Italy.

But if its length is matched only by Wagner’s “Ring,” its romantic story echoes one of the most familiar themes in both the East and the West--even the purest love can be blocked by war, politics and stifling social conventions. There’s also a ghost story, which is typically Chinese. One lover dies, but the love affair continues. “Her body is still in perfect form,” explains a synopsis. “She begs her beloved to dig her up so she can return to the world.”

At the end of the 22 hours, she’s alive again and married to the hero. Meanwhile, we’ve seen more parallels to Western drama. Like Shakespeare’s history plays, “The Peony Pavilion” epic is diverse and sprawling, full of subplots that introduce warriors, royalty, scholars and ordinary folk, illuminating conditions both in the Song dynasty (ending in 1279), when the story takes place, and the Ming dynasty, when it was written. The opera has the sweep of great literature, but it’s all but unknown outside China.

But now turn the spotlight on John Rockwell and Peter Sellars.

Rockwell, editor of the Sunday Arts & Leisure section of the the New York Times and director of the Lincoln Center Festival from its founding in 1996 until early this year, “heard about this ‘Peony’ thing” sometime in the ‘80s. “I’m bemused by huge things,” he says. “Wagner, for instance, and the long Robert Wilson productions at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I thought ‘The Peony Pavillion’ was a Ming ‘Ring,’ and the idea went into my brain and stayed there.”

When he got his job at Lincoln Center, he was determined, he says, “to present works of scale,” and “The Peony Pavilion” was an obvious choice.

But he wasn’t the only one with “Peony” on his mind. “I’ve been working on this piece for nine years,” announces Peter Sellars, who is quick to recall that he presented scenes from it at the 1990 Los Angeles Festival. “I worked with Hua Wenyi, the most famous Chinese classical actress, [former head of the Shanghai Kunju Opera Company,] and reigning master of the kunju tradition. She and several members of her company were living in America, working in restaurants and video stores. She said, ‘My tradition will die in one generation unless you do something!’ ”

Rockwell, meanwhile, had his own Chinese collaborator, Chen Shizheng, a singer, actor, director, and choreographer in his 30s who was born in China and came to the United States 11 years ago. Chen was the supple highlight of last fall’s “Marco Polo,” an impressionistic opera by the Chinese composer Tan Dun that played to sold-out houses in New York. Chen, too, has credentials in Chinese opera, and he and Rockwell planned a trip to China in March 1997 to visit, as Rockwell says, “five of the six existing kunju companies, to see what kind of ‘Peony’ tradition might still be extant.”

“But then it turned out that Peter was working on a parallel ‘Peony Pavilion’ project,” Rockwell adds, “so I invited him to come along.”

What they saw were excerpts from the work, which are all that survive in current Chinese performance, usually staged for a small and aging audience. All three travelers were inspired to restore the work to its former glory--but in very different ways.

Rockwell took his cue from the Western “early music” movement, which plays Bach in a reconstructed version of 18th century style. Why not do the whole “Peony Pavilion,” he thought, in a production in which each detail would both come alive as art and be justified through the finest scholarly research?

Sellars disagreed. In the first place, he says, you can’t reconstruct the original. The words exist, but the music doesn’t. Rockwell answers that the music was written down, but Sellars scoffs that the notation is vague, so vague that any reconstructed “Peony” would be “literally a fabrication.”

In any case, Sellars adds, “the notion of ‘authentic performance’ is laughable in China. It’s a Western idea.”

And then there was Hua, his kunju expert, who told him that his “Peony Pavilion” “must be new.” Sellars all but glows recounting this. “The most distinguished bearer of the tradition said it must be new!”

Chen was caught in the middle. “I always found Peter’s mind fascinating,” he says. “I was touched by how passionately he felt about the thought of ideal love. That was a very strong way to approach this piece.”

But when Sellars asked him to be the leading man in his production, he had second thoughts. “He was trying to transport the story into contemporary America. And I guess I didn’t know, I didn’t grow up here, I didn’t have that immediate connection.”

Instead Chen opted to be Rockwell’s director, and the two “Peonys” went their separate ways, until this summer, when both were supposed to be performed at the Lincoln Center Festival.

In May, Sellars “Peony” premiered, as planned, at the Vienna Festival. By then, it had lost its contemporary American setting and also the political subtext of the original, focusing entirely on the central love story. It lasts four hours, and presents parts of the kunju original along with an English translation performed as a play and a completely new opera by emigre composer Tan.

All three segments are staged on the same abstract set, with video cameras studying faces of the singers and actors in close detail. Hua, performing in classic kunju style, is the star of the first half, though she’s partnered by an actor, and mirrored by an actress in many scenes. Tan’s unusual, ecstatic opera owns the second half. In a bow toward Chinese music, it’s written as an endless melody with no supporting harmonic structure, and sung by two Western opera singers, with Hua and the actors making occasional contributions.

Sellars stresses that even the kunju parts owe little to tradition. “Hua Wenyi kept pushing forward in rehearsal,” he remembers, “trying to find something fresh. She’d show me how she’d always done something, and I’d ask her why. If she didn’t know, we’d explore it.

“She likes to be challenged, and she’s very daring. So anything that struck me as boring or cliched is gone now.”

The Times’ Mark Swed called the result “astonishing,” and picked out the death scene as “a great moment in modern theater.” Austrian and German critics were more restrained, but equally astonished by the mix of musical and theatrical styles. “Whoever succeeds in . . . opening up to the synthesis will receive his share of touching experiences,” wrote the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

In his own way, Chen was just as adventurous.

Once Chinese scholarship had established an ur-text--the complete reconstruction of music and words--Chen launched himself into a world of fantasy. As he explains, he couldn’t just put a historical document on stage, limiting himself to a form set in stone so many centuries ago it doesn’t need a director.

Instead, Chen tried to bring alive its deeper meaning. The original, he says, would have been performed outdoors, so he asked for an extravagant set that included a real duck pond, with vendors walking through the audience pouring tea. Working with Hua’s former ensemble, the Shanghai Kunju Opera Company, he drew freely on material from the past and the present, including ghost stories he’d read in his own Chinese childhood. “I based my view of hell, in this production, on wood prints I saw in my early reading of Chinese mythology,” he says, laughing. “I had a lot of fun visualizing that.”

The production was scheduled to open the Lincoln Center Festival July 7, playing first in six parts on six successive nights, followed by a single weekend marathon. But first, Chen previewed his “Peony Pavilion” in Shanghai, a month after Sellars’ Vienna opening. The audience was younger, larger and more enthusiastic than the usual kunju crowd, and a rave review appeared in the Communist Party’s Beijing newspaper, the People’s Daily.

By then, Sellars had decided not to bring his version to Lincoln Center. “I’m working on the show still,” he explains. “Plus, I didn’t want a battle of the bands.”

Lincoln Center, he adds--which spreads its festival to several locations--had planned to put both “Peonys” on the stage of nearby Fiorella LaGuardia High School. “It’s the wrong size for me,” Sellars says.

Not, of course, that he felt anything but goodwill for the Chen production. “But I’m not so desperate for a gig in New York that I have to go to a high school auditorium.”

Imagine a drumroll here--a sinister one--because it’s time to meet Ma Bomin, former Peking opera singer, current head of the Shanghai Bureau of Culture. She saw “The Peony Pavilion” preview and conveyed her own critique--impounding the sets and costumes and forbidding the performers to leave for the U.S. It didn’t matter that Lincoln Center had already paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for the production, or that it had a contract with the Shanghai Kunju Opera Company or that the collaboration had been endorsed by Ma’s own bureau and the national Culture Ministry.

Nigel Redden, an experienced administrator who had run the Festival of Two Worlds in Charleston, S.C., had just been hired to head the Lincoln Center Festival, succeeding John Rockwell. He began his job by flying to Shanghai to negotiate--entering, as he describes it, a kind of surrealistic Never-Neverland.

The production, he was told, was “feudal,” “superstitious” and “pornographic,” though all sexual references, along with depictions of corrupt officials and the supernatural, were in the 1598 original. The sex, in any case, was extremely mild by current Western standards.

Ma asked for changes. Chen made some, giving in most reluctantly on a scene in which large white paper dolls were burned during a funeral procession. Ma thought that was a throwback to China’s backward days. But for Chen, it reflected “a beautiful tradition, even in contemporary China. I saw people burning a paper Mercedes at a funeral in Hong Kong. In the opera, it was a powerful image, because the dolls deform in the fire, jut like the heroine who dies for love.”

Chen cut the scene, but still Ma wouldn’t budge. Redden talked with her for hours, along with seven shadowy kunju opera experts who seemed to work with her. He notes that she’s far from any stereotype of a tight-lipped Maoist. Instead, he says, she’s quite Western and knows how to use her charm. “She was a pleasant dinner companion,” he remembers. “We chatted about wine and food.”

But he couldn’t grasp her real agenda. Nothing was ever accomplished, and yet he was invited to still more meetings, to lunches, to dinners. “That’s what I don’t understand,” he says. “Why she couldn’t say it’s done for, it’s gone, go away.”

The only hint of compromise was a soft suggestion, bizarre by Western standards, that Lincoln Center postpone its festival, possibly for months. By then, the Chinese seemed to be saying, something might be worked out. (This later became their public position, stated formally to a French reporter. In their view, Lincoln Center had caused the trouble, by refusing to be flexible.)

President Clinton, by then in the middle of his China trip, didn’t make “Peony” a public issue. The mayor of Shanghai said he hadn’t seen the previews but noted Ma’s “complaint” and didn’t want a Chinese tradition turned into “a comedy.” Beijing ruled the whole affair commercial and said it had no jurisdiction.

Redden tried one last tactic, a dramatic exit. At the airport, he found Ma upstaging him, holding a press conference to announce that she’d released the sets and costumes. Redden tore up his ticket to demonstrate his willingness to talk some more. But on the matter of the performers, Ma never wavered. Lincoln Center had no choice; it canceled the production.

Back in New York, Beverly Sills doesn’t try to hide her feelings. “I’m insulted,” she says, going beyond her role as chairman of the Lincoln Center board to make the battle personal. “I’m insulted that this woman considers herself an ex-opera singer. Us divas don’t work like that!”

She’d called her friend Henry Kissinger, whom she serves with on the boards of Macy’s and American Express. He phoned the mayor of Shanghai, but to no avail.

“One embarrassing question from the president or Madeline Albright could have broken the dam,” Sills fumes. “I called Mrs. Albright and asked for her help. We’re friends. I’ve been at her home for dinner. I’m surprised. I’m disappointed.”

Chen, to put it mildly, is heartbroken. “I disbelieved that this could happen in today’s China,” he said just days after the cancellation, talking in endless spirals, grieving not only for himself but for the Shanghai company, for the 400 women who sewed the costumes, and for the carpenters who built the set. “Ma and her entourage,” he says, “have no sympathy or even remote respect for the Shanghai artists. They just gave orders. They own them.”

He’s on the phone to Shanghai daily, where his colleagues tell him that “they’re forced to watch the video of their production every afternoon, all 55 scenes.” Their job? To identify everything that might displease the Shanghai culture bureau. “This is slow torture,” Chen sighs. “Some are hurt so deeply, they couldn’t stop their tears.”

John Rockwell, helpless at the Times, unable (because of his role in the production) to take part in the paper’s coverage, feels “crushed and sad and depressed and angry.” After the Lincoln Center Festival, Chen’s “Peony” was supposed to begin touring to co-producing festivals, starting in mid-November at the Festival d’Automne in Paris, and going on to Sydney and Hong Kong. Rockwell is “hoping against hope” that somehow it will. In Paris, he says, “they’re gearing up big time to make this a European intellectual cause celebre.”

Speaking from Paris, Josephine Markovitz, who’s in charge of music at the Festival d’Automne and who saw the “Peony” previews in Shanghai, says she’s mobilizing diplomatic pressure, too. Would she allow a bowdlerized production, restaged out of Shanghai, without Chen?

“No,” she firmly answers. “We will only accept what Chen Shizheng will sign.” Still, she believes there may be more room for compromise. “If he can allow 20% of his work to be changed,” she says, “it will still remain a kind of masterpiece.”

As for Sellars, his “Peony Pavilion” is the only one the West is guaranteed to see, with productions scheduled this fall in London and Paris, and in March in Berkeley.

Most of all, though, he longs to bring it to China, where his two superstars--Hua, now living in Los Angeles, and Tan, who lives in New York--might influence their nation’s culture.

“These two,” he says, “‘who might never have met in China, in effect are having a discussion, a collaboration, one I’m privileged to witness. It’s as if they’re imagining the future of their homeland.”

But there’s no guarantee they’ll take their story home. Sellars staged his “Peony” with striking, vivid love scenes. A Chinese official went to the Vienna premiere--and was said to find it far too sexual for a Chinese audience.