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.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF NTCH
"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.
"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.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s