This experimental opera was chosen as a candidate for the award of the Top Ten Performance Arts of the Fifth Tai-Hsin Arts Awards. Playwright Wang An-Chi won the 21st Golden Melody Award for the Best Lyrics for Traditional and Artistic Music, and the leading actor Chen Mei-Lan also won the 21st Golden Melody Award for the Best Interpreter of Traditional Music.
Viewing the opera from the perspective of modern literature, A Conversation at the Tombstone is a parody. In Western literary theory, a parody is not a mere imitation, but a creative and critical imitation, which is exactly what the opera is.
The opera can be divided into three parts. The first part is an adaptation of the story An Afternoon Dream in the Garden by Li Kai-Xian of the Ming Dynasty. The second part, the core of the opera, presents the heart-to-heart talk between Wen-Ji on her way home and the spirit of Zhao-Jun who is from the Han Dynasty and shows the creative efforts of the playwright. The third part is comical as it is a revision of the dialogue of Wen-Ji and Zhao-Jun in An Afternoon Dream in the Garden and echoes the plot of the first part. The dialogues in the opera do not seem to relate to each other, but are connected as a whole by the fisher woman’s dreams. The first and the third parts clearly model the original story, but the second part, i.e., the core part that seems to be original, is full of lines taken from Chinese literary classics such as Zhao-Jun Crossing the Border, Wen-Ji Returning to China, Stories of the Han Palace and Du Fu’s poems, and thus poke fun at intellectuals and scholars of different historical eras.
Audiences used to watching operas presenting a complete story from beginning to end may find it hard to follow such an experimental work which does not have any plot line or dramatic conflict. The opera consists of three parts of dialogues or conversations among women. The content seems loose at first glance, but it actually explores the complex relationships of history, women, literature, and readers who influence and at the same time deconstruct each other. The opera thus reveals the conflict of illusion and facts in history and literature, and is therefore a kind of meta-drama that discusses literary creation in literature.
In Chinese traditional culture, Zhao-Jun and Wen-Ji are two incomplete characters that are desolate but beautiful at the same time and have attracted the philosophical minds of many authors and scholars for thousands of years. But such unceasing literary creation continues to create the distance between the reality of the two women and the presentations of them in literature. If literature is no more than reflections of reality, this opera connects three worlds: reality (the two women presented in historical records), literature (the creative works of scholars of different generations and the women themselves), and readers (those who make enquiries of the two women), through the dialogue of Zhao-Jun and Wen-Ji. It mocks the scholars of different times and the playwright herself and questions the illusory nature of history and literature with the exchanges of the two women.
Only when this illusory nature implied in the opera is understood, can the arrangement of the three parts of the opera be truly perceived. In the third part, the illogical dialogue of Zhano-Jun and Wen-Ji and the absurd scene of the two yelling at each other, a mimic of the original story in An Afternoon Dream in the Garden, reveal the rich flavor of a parody and add a comical element to the tragic tone of the opera. The second part seems to subvert the tradition while presenting an in-depth discussion of women in literature and strengthening the theme of the illusory nature of literature and history of the opera.
