Also Co-Founder and Festival Director of Wuzhen Theatre Festival.
Stan Lai is "the best Chinese language playwright and director in the world" (BBC); "Asia's top theatre director" (Asia week); and “Asia’s flagship playwright” (China Daily). Beginning in Taiwan in the 1980s, Lai’s plays have greatly influenced theatre in the Chinese speaking world, including his most famous play, Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land, which was performed in English at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2015. His The Village has been described by Beijing News as "the pinnacle of our era of theatre." His epic 8-hour A Dream Like A Dream (2000), has been called by China Daily "possibly the greatest Chinese-language play since time immemorial." One One Zero Eight is Lai's 39th original work as playwright and director, and his 4th offering at Wuzhen Theatre Festival.
Lai is Artistic Director of Performance Workshop, Taiwan; Theatre Above, Shanghai; and Co-founder and Festival Director of the Wuzhen Theatre Festival, China.
Also Co-Founder and Producing Director of Wuzhen Theatre Festival.
Huang Lei is one of the most prominent actors in China, in theatre, television and film. He is also a screenwriter, theatre producer, and a TV & film director and producer. Hang Lei has been teaching at the Beijing Film Academy for 22 years. During his many years of teaching, and with his sound knowledge of literature and artistic practices, Huang Lei has creatively formulated his diversified methods of training actors, nurturing much outstanding young talent for the TV and film industries.
Huang Lei’s acting is popular with audiences and acclaimed by critics. His theatre credits include Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land and The Yellow Storm; TV and film credits include April Rhapsody, A Love for Separation, A Little Reunion, Hey Daddy!, Honey Bee Man, Between Husband and Wife, Guys Clan, When Tangerines Turn Red, Life on A String. He has also written and directed many works for television and film, especially the TV series Lost Time, which he wrote, directed and acted in, and which was shot in Wuzhen in 2003 and won him great popularity and warm appreciation all over China, while at the same time introducing the timeless beauty of Wuzhen to the public.
In 2013, Huang Lei co-founded Wuzhen Theatre Festival with Chen Xianghong, Stan Lai and Meng Jinghui.
He is also part of the jury for this year’s Festival.
Raymond Zhou is a prominent bilingual writer and cultural critic, especially in the fields of film, theatre and cross-cultural interpretation. For more than a decade he contributed columns for China Daily and Movie View, and he now writes and hosts a weekly segment for CCTV’s Movie Channel.
Zhou is the author of 21 books, published since 1998. Of these, three are in English. The Los Angeles Times calls him “China’s Roger Ebert.”
Zhou has been on the jury for the Competition section of the Wuzhen Theatre Festival and has often participated in the Forum section. His play The Ring Road uses China’s road structure as a metaphor for today’s Chinese society and its stumbling blocks and pitfalls. The original English version premiered in Los Angeles in 2010, and the updated Chinese version toured China in 2014 and 2015.
Zhou is a prolific writer with over 100 articles published each year and the same number of media appearances. He has been invited to several BBC Culture polls as a culture expert from China. The cover story he wrote for American Theatre, with critical reflections on contemporary Chinese theatre, has just won the Critics Award conferred by the International Association of Theatre Critics, Chinese section.
Zhou is a graduate of Hangzhou University, Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, and the University of California at Berkeley.
A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, majoring in Comparative Literature, Ismene Ting is well-known as a playwright and stage director, and respected as one of the foremost actresses on the Chinese language stage.
Ismene Ting is also a core member of Performance Workshop.
Ting’s plays include Come Dance with Me, Love on a Two-Way Street, We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!, Finding Shangri-La, Mumble Jumble, This is Real, A Blurry Kind of Love, The Lone Man Hotel, Shangri-La Mon Amour, Just Play It, The Eternal Coffee Time, Flower Eaters, A Date with Me. Just Play It was selected by The Beijing News as one of ten best productions of 2010 and 2012.
She has performed in Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land (1991, 1999), Red Sky (1994), I.Me.He.Him, Mumble Jumble, A Dream Like A Dream (2005), Like Shadows, among others.
Ting’s television credits include screenwriter and acting coach for Stan Lai’s sit-com Rich House, Poor House (2018). Screenwriter and one of the lead actors for the sit-com Both Families are Human (2004) and Finding Shangri-La (2009), Ting's first feature film, received the Best Cinematography award at the 32nd Cairo International Film Festival. The farce, Love on a Two-Way Street, which was a hit both in Taiwan and Shanghai, has been adapted into the film I Love You, Too (2013).
From 2001 to 2003, working with veteran director Edward Lam and renowned actors Daniel Wu, Rene Liu, and Liao Fan, Ismene Ting was featured on stage in Who's Calling Eileen Chang, The Importance of Being Vulgar, The Happy Prince, and Eighteen Springs. Ting began serving on the Competition Jury for the Emerging Theatre Artist’s Competition of the Wuzhen Theatre Festival in 2017. She was also Consulting Director for the 2011 Taiwan Lantern Festival, Program Director for Nick Vujicic's 2011 “Never Give Up” Taiwan tour, and Associate Director of the 2009 Deaflympics’ Opening and Closing Ceremonies, Taipei.