The fights dim again until there is nothing but a lone spotlight shining center stage. They will be part of someone else's story. Tonight they have a chance to participate in a moving drama. Everyone is filled with nervous excitement. The other musicians are still busy tuning. The percussionist holds one hand ready to strike a leather drum while the other holds up clappers. As the houselights come up, the musicians enter and start to tune their instruments. When one man loves another, it can't be simple and it's hard to know how to begin. In the end they both stand up and walk away.Īctually, one actor really is in love with the other. The actors feign death, and the curtain falls. His life is over, and she will choose not to go on living.īut this is only an opera. Yuji's entire existence depends on Xiang Yu. Opposite him is the actor who plays General Xiang Yu, Yu Ji's lover. One belongs to the actor playing the beautiful concubine Yuji. Both of the actors are in full makeup, and we see two brightly colored faces. They have nowhere to hide.īut we are still in the theater, watching the opera being performed for us onstage. Once the curtain goes up they have to perform the play from beginning to end. Of course, those of us in the audience can always walk out but the players have no choice. We sit in the dark, threatened by vague menaces. Instead, we must endure convoluted plot twists and excruciating moments of suspense. It would be easier for all of us if we could watch only the highlights.

But how much of that is just stagecraft?Īfter all, life is just a play. In exchange they reveal a part of the elusive secret that is their charm. In the same way, women have long depended on men to sustain them. His strength and power come from artifice-he relies on them to live, just as an embryo draws nourishment from the body of the mother, and the growing child holds fast to her hand. Without a stage to prop him up, the actor is just an ordinary man, with an unmemorable face and unfulfilled expectations. Compared to their stories, everyday life is like the plain and pale face of an actor stripped of his makeup. The stage is populated by brilliant young scholars and beautiful ladies whose exalted passions are more vivid than the drab colors of our workaday existence. He may be an emperor, a statesman, or a great general. A prostitute has to make her living by putting on a show of feeling in bed an actor may be the embodiment of virtue and integrity as he struts upon the stage. Prostitutes have no heart actors have no morals.

Farewell My Concubine by Lilian Lee