The theater begins before you even realize you have entered it. At the heart of Huichang's theater village this summer stands a miniature cinema unlike any other — a black box capable of rotating 360 degrees.
Audience members step inside, take their seats, and wait for the curtain to rise. But there is no film. Instead, the stage is the world outside: the town square itself, its weathered facades, passing pedestrians and clusters of curious onlookers.
During the just-concluded Huichang Theater Season 004, this performance, titled Panorama, unfolded almost daily.
Crowds packed around the small structure as actors drew passersby into the action, inviting them to dance, improvise and slip into unexpected roles.
Even those with little interest in theater found themselves lingering. One afternoon, Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia, the revered star of Chinese cinema, sat quietly inside the black box, watching.
For a moment, it was impossible to tell who was performing and who was simply living.
The script
That ambiguity feels fitting here, because Huichang's theater village is itself a story — one written long before any curtain rose.
In the 1980s, while studying in the United States, playwright and director Stan Lai received a letter from relatives in Huichang county, Jiangxi province, introducing him to the hometown he had never known.
His father was born there but rarely spoke about it. In 1949, the family left for Taiwan and later settled in the US. When Lai was 14, his father died. It was only through letters from relatives in Huichang that he began to piece together the place his father had left behind.
By 1986, Lai had become one of the most influential figures in Chinese-language theater with Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land. In Chinese lore, the Peach Blossom Land is an unreachable utopia. In Lai's work, both his father and Huichang seemed to linger in the background.
When he first visited Huichang in 1997, the journey took nearly 20 hours along mountain roads. Northwest Street, where his father once lived, was lined with crumbling houses.
"I never thought Huichang was my Peach Blossom Land," Lai says.
In 2015, Lai staged one of his plays in Huichang for the first time and vowed to return every year. Two years later, when the county began renovating the old town, he proposed turning his father's old neighborhood into a theater community.
The first Huichang Theater Season opened in 2024. This year, in its fourth edition, the festival brought nearly 30 productions from China and abroad, with close to 400 performances across the town.
Despite not being born here, Lai has become unmistakably local. Residents speak of him less as a celebrity than as a neighbor.
"I went to school with his nephew," one resident says.
"I live right next to his old house," says another.
If you happen to see him strolling through the town, you can simply call him Teacher Lai.
