The understanding in theatrical aesthetics can generally be divided into three levels: one is the background understanding, the second is the surface understanding, and the third is the inner understanding.

Contextual understanding provides the conditions for superficial and internal comprehension, and does not itself occupy a stage in the process of aesthetic comprehension. Contextual understanding includes the audience's perception of the social concepts and historical knowledge used in the work, as well as the comprehension of the simplification and symbolic techniques adopted in the work. Contextual understanding is meant to facilitate the overall aesthetic, but it can sometimes be an obstacle. For example, many plays rely too much on outdated concepts and trivial knowledge, and have become "aesthetic blocks" that the audience does not like to swallow. Some plays are too rigid or too rapid in adopting the "conventional" artistic technique, which becomes another aesthetic trouble.

What is really noteworthy is the audience's superficial understanding and inner understanding.

In the work, the superficial understanding and the inner understanding are so integrated that it is difficult to separate them. The quality of the inner understanding is contained in the surface story, and the dramatist leaves many channels in the surface story that can connect with the deep meaning, using the surface story as a kind of support and transition. In this way, even for the audience who is not capable of making a deep understanding, they will have a little taste of some strange aftertaste in the surface understanding, and perceive some off-string sounds that make them feel confused. This may be an opportunity for these audiences to improve in the future.

Different levels of understanding all involve a certain degree of generalization. In general, superficial comprehension uses specific generalizations, while deep comprehension uses general generalizations. It refers to the understanding of specific things, and for drama, it is mainly used to understand the storyline, character actions, and dramatic language; General generalization is the categorical understanding of things, and for the audience, they get rid of the attachment to the details of the plot and begin to think about the universal purpose of the play, which enters the stage of general generalization.

For superficial understanding, many dramatists tend to try to be simple, and they only want to hand over the opportunity of understanding to the inner level. Actually, this is artistically inappropriate. Vega said that a clever "pun" will arouse the pleasure of understanding the audience, which shows that the superficial understanding should also try to give full play to the audience's initiative, so that they can make some judgments and generalizations from time to time. A good work of art should be attractive to every inch of its skin, and even if it is irrelevant to the grand point, it should have the temptation to understand the audience. It's like a novelist who tells a story that keeps the reader engaged in every word, rather than getting tired all the way until a key part of the story. In short, the so-called superficial understanding is to make the entire superficial layer full of understanding factors, and become a capillary leading to the inner understanding. Surface understanding is the starting point of understanding, and in order to fulfill the aesthetic mission of understanding, the starting point should not be blocked. There is such a detail in the Hunan opera "The Pipa Story": Cai Bojiao went to Beijing to catch the exam and did not return for a long time, Cai Gong and Cai Po, who were hungry and cold, supported each other and looked at the road, and her daughter-in-law Zhao Wuniang borrowed rice and came back, and helped the second elder back while comforting, but when the second elder was not paying attention, she herself secretly turned her face and glanced at the road. At first glance, her hope is exactly contradictory to the words she just said to comfort the second elder that there is no need to look anymore, but the audience immediately understands the meaning of this hope. Why wasn't she anxious? But she couldn't help but hide her anxiety, so she had to look, and she had to look at it. This small detail certainly belongs to the scope of superficial understanding, but the audience can only understand this hope and feel happy in such a short understanding only by summarizing the previous plot, Zhao Wuniang's character and her current situation.

For the inner understanding, the audience needs to spend a certain amount of effort. However, this mental energy is presented as an "epiphany". Li Yu is very opposed to the way of understanding "thinking deeply and then getting what you want", because it violates the nature of drama as a temporal and procedural mobile art.

The stage in Vikhodir, Czech Republic

The "epiphany" type of understanding is the result of the orderly and in-depth understanding factors contained in the work, and it is a kind of quick harvest that comes naturally. To achieve this, it is necessary to remove the confusion of the factors of understanding. The ideological connotation can be rich and full, but in the aesthetic field, it must be filtered and precipitated into a clear and mellow state. The surface of the work can be colorful, and the inner layer must be purer, so as to reach a peaceful spiritual end. Therefore, the inner understanding is the elimination of layers of self-disturbing factors, the liberation of various centrifugal forces of thinking, and the first thing to encounter after exclusion and liberation. Because of this, there is always a great deal of mystery in inner understanding.