By Vic Cox

Theater-goers are snapping up tickets to Kenneth Pai’s version of the Chinese opera “The Peony Pavilion,” playing at the Lobero Theatre Oct. 6-8. As of Sept. 21 only a few seats remain to be sold in the 650-seat Lobero, not bad for a 400-year-old opera about young love conquering all obstacles, even death.

Pai, a UCSB professor of Chinese literature who retired in 1994, is considered one of the best-known, contemporary Chinese novelists. Several of his novels have been turned into films, but this is his most auspicious effort to present a classic kunqu opera (pronounced “kwun chyu”) to younger audiences. He calls his adaptation “The Peony Pavilion—Young Lovers’ Edition.”

Though Pai trimmed the original 20-hour opera to nine hours, the young lovers version plays out over three days. Each of the 3-hour musical segments in the linked performance can stand alone.

The opera will have toured University of California venues in Berkeley, Irvine, and Los Angeles before it comes to Santa Barbara next week. UCSB Arts and Lectures is co-sponsoring the opera with Pai’s former home Department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, in association with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and other local groups.

Arts & Lectures’ fall performance season, which begins Oct. 4 with blues and jazz vocalist Madeleine Peyroux <www.artsandlectures.ucsb.edu>, contains no other event so colorful and ambitious as “The Peony Pavilion.” Its story is often compared with Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” complete with a rich cast of supporting characters, but Pavilion relies on large doses of the supernatural—the heroine dies before she meets the hero—and comes up with a happy ending.

“The Chinese like happy endings,” says Pai with a smile. But adds that he finds that Western audiences respond well to the emotions presented in song and dance. “It’s like ballet,” he says. “You don’t need to know the story. It’s enough that the movements are beautiful.”

The 70-member cast, drawn primarily from Jiangsu Province’s Suzhou Kun Opera Theater, wear some 200 handcrafted costumes during the opera. This enhances the visual impact of the dances, acrobatics, and martial arts movements on a minimalist stage. English translations of the arias’ poetic lyrics play on screens beside the stage, helping audiences with nuances in what Pai describes as “a sexy story.”

His passion for the ancient kunqu form of musical theater grew out of an experience as a boy of nine or 10 in Shanghai, when he first saw a scene from “The Peony Pavilion.” From then on, he recalls, “The music haunted me.”

Moreover, the refined, literary form of kunqu—which Pai calls “the mother of Chinese opera”—was dying in China. Dating back to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), it had been banned for a decade during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ‘70s. Its master teachers were in their sixties and the younger generation “didn’t know this beautiful tradition. It was a crisis.”

The Young Lovers’ Edition was Pai’s response. He not only edited and shortened the original opera but also produced the version currently on tour. He started by casting young, “very good-looking, talented” principal singers, he notes. “I felt I had to rescue this great art form.”

Following a tour last year of Chinese and Taiwanese universities, Pai launched the UC tour. For the UCSB lap, Santa Barbara Mayor Marty Blum has declared the first week in October to be Peony Pavilion Week.

As part of a series of presentations, on Oct. 3, Pai and former East Asian studies colleagues will discuss the opera at 4 p.m. in the MultiCultural Center on campus. On Oct. 4 at 5:30 p.m., “The Mystique of Kun Opera and ‘The Peony Pavilion’” is the topic at the Victoria Hall Theatre. Also, the Lobero will open an hour before each performance for a pre-show discussion of the history, music, and costumes.

Climaxing the celebration of this special facet of Chinese culture, on Oct. 8 at 6 p.m. Chancellor Henry Yang and Dilling Yang will host a private dinner with the Pavilion cast at the Montecito Country Club. Tickets, which do not include the 2 p.m. final performance, cost $150. Call x3535 for details.