Ask anyone—almost anyone—about Chinese theatre in America and you'll get fast directions to Chinatown, be it New York, San Francisco or Los Angeles, and assurances that there you can see the real thing. What they mean are the numerous productions of Peking Opera, or sometimes Cantonese Opera, that take place every year.

But walk the streets of any Chinatown; push your way through dense crowds; meet the kids split between life at school and at home; come to know the garment workers in the sweatshops on the second floor above the restaurants, grocery stores and souvenir shops; hang around the steaming restaurant kitchens for awhile, and you'll be forced to wonder what all this has to do with those elaborate stories of princesses, kings and courtiers, sung in dialects that almost no one can follow without assistance, of a past time that has become a never-never land.