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Looking to the other world for answers

Performance Workshop's Like Shadows takes an esoteric look at a troubled young girl using the detective genre. PHOTO: COURTESY OF NTCH

Murder, adultery, neglect and a little detective work are at the heart of Performance Workshop's (表演工作坊) newest play, Like Shadows (如影隨行), which opens tonight at the National Theater.

The 150-minute play was originally written while Stan Lai (賴聲川), Performance Workshop's artistic director, was a visiting professor at Stanford University teaching a class on collective creation through the use of improvisation, his method for training and collaborating with actors to produce work for the stage.

"I started by asking my student actors: 'Are you aware of any of your family or friends who have recently passed away but are having trouble going to the next stage,'" he said to the Taipei Times.

"Whatever your religious background or philosophical beliefs, wherever you think people go after they die, a person might not get there because of some sort of obsession or some attachment to life."

One student from Chicago talked about a friend whose father killed his mother thinking that she was having a affair with a neighbor. The father then killed himself. Lai took the story as the topic of his students' workshop, which spawned Stories for the Dead.

Performance notes: What: Performance Workshop's (表演工作坊) Like Shadows (如影隨行) Where: National Theater, 21-1 Zhongshan S Rd, Taipei City (台北市中山南路21-1號); Taichung Chungshan Hall (台中中山堂), 98, Hsuehshi Rd, Taichung (台中市學士路98號); Kaohsiung Chihteh Hall (高雄至德堂), 67 Wufu 1st Rd, Kaohsiung City (高雄市五福一路67號) When: Taipei, today through Dec. 31, except Wednesday; Taichung performances are on Jan. 12 and Jan. 13 and Kaohsiung performances are on Jan. 18 and Jan. 19 Tickets: Weekend performances are NT$500 to NT$3,000; weekday performances are NT$500 to NT$2,800 available from NTCH ticketing or online at www.artsticket.com.tw

"It became incredibly interesting to me … a sort of unfolding of events. We started from a real event and start unfolding the fictitious events which were much more interesting. And lots of other characters came out - some imaginary, some real, and it became a tapestry of real and unreal figures," Lai said.

Similar to the original work Like Shadows follows the life of a troubled teenaged girl, who is investigating the cause of her mother's death and her father's mysterious disappearances and in the process becomes capable of communicating with the spirit world. When her parents suddenly begin to appear to her, shocking secrets about her family tragedy are revealed.

"The play is a lot about neglect, you know, families, dysfunctional families, that neglect each other, people who neglect each other," Lai said.

The themes covered in Like Shadows are outside the norm for Lai, who often investigates forgotten Chinese theatrical forms and obscure stories and then revives them. "I rarely work with murder," he said. "But why not. This is America, right?" he said, alluding to the Americanization of global society. "Violent stories are the norm and in Asia this not a special thing."

Though the story is set in America, its themes and imagery are comprehensible to most Taiwanese people because Lai incorporates ideas that he gleaned from Buddhism, a religion he has practiced for more than 30 years.

"Since Dream like a Dream (如夢之夢) in 2000, I've become less and less shy about my own practice (of Buddhism) and more of it is becoming unashamedly (part of) my work," he said.

Buddhism, then, becomes the lens through which Lai investigates the girl's life, the mysteries she reveals and how she is able to come to terms with her troubled past.

"I think the whole thing about Buddhism is opening your boundaries and saying that what we see, of course, is not the whole deal and what we feel is not the whole deal. All sorts of things are intersecting that we are not aware of," Lai said.

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