Stories of Eunuchs, Consorts and Emperors

In 1992 Wei Hai-ming gave a performance of the classic Chinese opera episode “The Tipsy Concubine” that was stunning in its understated elegance. Ms. Wei, depicting the eighth-century consort Yang Yu-huan attended by eunuchs and drowning her sorrows after a snub from her emperor, Xuan-zong, was exquisite in her subtle bobbing and weaving, with vocal modulations to match. The scene drew added intimacy from its setting, the wee, now defunct Taipei Theater deep in the basement of the McGraw-Hill Building.
Ms. Wei returned to New York as Yang, the Precious Consort, on Tuesday with the Contemporary Legend Theater of Taiwan as part of the opening night of the Lincoln Center Festival. The hourlong production was grander than the remembered one, with extras in attendance and a sizable set built into the stage of the Rose Theater. Some of the intimacy was lost in the larger space, and the strokes were necessarily bolder, the gestures generally broader.
But all this is churlish. Ms. Wei is an utterly compelling stage presence, and she played deftly here to the larger scale. The wooden stage set was attractive and uncluttered, with columns, lanterns and a translucent flowery screen, and the costumes were colorful and gorgeous.
Ms. Wei is a pillar of this Taipei company, along with its artistic director, Wu Hsing-kuo, who conceived the production. They worked together in the second half of the program in another standard of the Chinese repertory, “Farewell My Concubine.”
The title, if not the work itself, gained familiarity in the West through Chen Kaige’s acclaimed 1993 film, loosely constructed around the opera. The historical context here goes back to the third century B.C., when, in a battle for control of the newly unified China, the valiant but rash Chu king Xiang Yu found himself and his troops hopelessly surrounded by Han forces.
Concubine Yu, trying to comfort her king and finding him inconsolable, decides to take herself out of the picture by slitting her throat with his sword. In this production, which frames this private scene with brief battle pieces, Xiang Yu ultimately does likewise.
“The king’s really irrelevant,” declares a character in the film, who obviously had not seen the imposing Wu Hsing-kuo in the role. But it is true that the role of the concubine (played by a man in the film, in keeping with a time-honored tradition of cross-dressing in Chinese opera) is central.
Wei Hai-ming also showed her command of this role at the Taipei Theater, in 1995, creating a figure almost as memorable as her Precious Consort. The action includes a famous sword dance, with which Concubine Yu tries to distract the king. The acrobatics so characteristic of Chinese opera are generally the work of lesser characters, but Ms. Wei showed her endless versatility here in some harrowing work with two swords, not quite baton twirling, not quite juggling.
In addition to its productions of traditional Chinese fare, the Contemporary Legend Theater is known for its Chinese opera versions of classic Western dramas. It presented a gripping adaptation of “Macbeth” at the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. two years ago, with Ms. Wei in a radically different mode and Mr. Wu in the title role. Tonight Mr. Wu will perform his one-man interpretation of “King Lear” at the Rose Theater, female roles as well as male.