The Small Theater Movement in the 1980s was a watershed in the development of modern drama and theater in Taiwan. Aesthetically, the movement gradually abandoned the realism trend that had been lingering the modern drama in Taiwan for a long time. It started from experimental theater, and avant-garde Theater developed anti-narrative, anti-literary, anti-framed stage, decentralization and deconstructed postmodern theater style in the second half of 1980s. In terms of ideology, it liberated the collective narrative that dominated by the ruling governments, and encouraged the consciousness of local subjectivity after the lifting of martial law. By the movement, the theater became a radical weapon for social resistance, which used to be propaganda purposes. As the aesthetics and political tendency of modern theatre in Taiwan changed, the directorial theater arisen. In 1990s, Wei-jan Chi was one of the few playwrights that only focused on play-writing. Most of the theater makers in that time took multiple positions in one production, including directing, play-writing and acting, such as Hugh K.S. Lee, Yu-Hui Wang, Chi-Mei Wang, etc. Nien-Jen Wu was one of those who moved from film to theater, shows the diversity of playwright environment.
This dissertation focus on three playwrights: Hugh K.S. Lee, Wei-jan Chi and Nien-Jen Wu, attempts to find a new way from the binary opposition between aesthetics and political tendency to analyze their works. What kind of script narrative strategies and aesthetic forms have been derived in the contemporary directorial theater? Among them, Hugh K.S. Lee , the three-in-one writer, actor and director, uses the structure of collage and meta-scenario to break the integrity and closure property of linear narratives, so to explore the true and false of individual memories; Wei-jan Chi uses "anti-traditional narrative mode" to strengthen the desire and subjectivity of the characters, in order to question the reliability of realistic and objective narrative; Nien-Jen Wu, who moved from film to theater, combined melodrama narrative with the neo-realistic aesthetics of new Taiwanese films, turned disciplinary collective narrative into a lyrical personal micro-narratives.
In the meanwhile, the dissertation also cites the post-colonial discourses in Taiwanese literary academia after the lifting of martial law and the research on the writing of native descendants, trying to discuss three playwrights' unique creative concerns while facing the new political narrative with the rising of native subjectivity. Hugh K.S. Lee is the second generation from other provinces, was anxious while facing the changing of the subject consciousness. This predicament may not comes entirely from his own resistance to the country, it may counts on the exclusivity form that made by the local situation. Being an excluded other, he can only metaphorically create an ideal (home) country in which his absent father (and himself) exists only. Wei-jan Chi takes a radical deconstruction strategy on the consciousness of country reshaping. It shows that the collective narrative is merely a collective delusion, which clearly echoes the post-colonial view of pluralism. Nien-Jen Wu often takes female perspective to deal with the male narrative hegemony, which consists a subtle female epic under the dual oppression of family and country. Under the contrast between aesthetics and political tendency, the dissertation outlines how the script creation reshaped its own narrative strategy after the collapse of the collective narrative and how it responded to the diverse developments of reality.