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The stage adaptation of literary classic Jane Eyre is one of the latest productions of the National Center for the Performing Arts. While movie blockbusters grab our attention the core of the nation's performing arts is live theater. A few hours before the last show of Li Lei and Han Meimei opened, I got a call from Jiang Xiaohan, the female lead. She had fractured her hand and had to wear a glove-like thing that "affected the body language of my character". She would "understand" if I decided to opt out. As a matter of fact, she'd be willing to refund anyone who felt dissatisfied with her hand-impaired performance. For me, live theater always holds a special fascination exactly because of such unexpected happenings. I go to a show not for perfection, but for a kind of magic only possible when the cast and the audience inhabit the same space and share the same dream. Judging from the audience response that night - with applause and laughs all the way, nobody was about to take up the offer of a refund. Li Lei and Han Meimei started its life as a series of high-school textbook illustrations. I did not learn of the inside jokes about the two characters secretly in love because the books were used in the 1990s. That means its target readers were those born in the 1980s, the "it" generation of our era. When they recall these illustrations, they come to realize they have this collective memory. The play fleshes out what was only hinted at, or more accurately, draws out what fantasies the original readers had about these characters. | 
