Bold Journey Features Stan Lai on Creativity, Humility, and Four Decades in Theatre

A feature like this starts with the right introduction to the right outlet. It is the kind of groundwork we lay through our press campaigns, and this one gave Bold Journey's readers a real look at one of the most accomplished figures in Chinese language theatre.

Our client Stan Lai sat down with Bold Journey for Meet Stan Lai, a conversation about what keeps a creative life going after more than four decades and over 40 original productions. Lai is widely regarded as the most performed playwright in the Chinese language, and the founder of Performance Workshop in Taipei, now marking its fortieth year.

In the interview, Lai talks about creativity less as a skill and more as a way of paying attention. He describes a life spent watching people, streets, and small ordinary moments, and treating all of it as worthy material, whether it is a passing conversation or a single strand of sunlight on a window. He is candid that this kind of attention only gets sharper with age, describing how his curiosity has taken on what he calls a shade of compassion over the years.

He also gets personal, crediting his mother, who raised him alone after his father's death, for never once steering him away from art, even in a place and time where a creative career was seen as a risk few families could afford. It is a rare, unguarded piece of a much larger story, one that includes founding the Wuzhen Theatre Festival, publishing a bestselling book on creativity, and directing dozens of productions across Taipei, Shanghai, and Beijing in a single year.

Read the full feature on boldjourney.com.