Print

Mail

wiki links

Back to the future

Taiwan Drama Performance is toughening up, slightly. PHOTO: COURTESY OF TAIWAN DRAMA PERFORMANCE

Taiwan Drama Performance (臺灣戲劇表演家劇團) will be coming to Taipei this week to wind up its nationwide tour of The Time Travel (我是你爸爸), the Chinese name of which translates literally as “I am your father.”

Directed by Li Chung-hsi (李宗熹), the new show turns its back on the sentimental themes previously favored by the group and uses a comic format to play games with the predictable paradoxes of time travel. The group has proved especially successful with campus and family audiences, and its shift from romantic drama to sentimental comedy makes few demands on the performers.

The story takes as its basis the director's own family life and then spins it out into a series of crises that needless to say are happily resolved at the end. Taiwan Drama Performance, like a number of other small theater companies, subsidizes its creative work through engagement with educational drama projects and public service theater, and its original works tend to carry the same stylistic constraints, and also the same kind of educational themes.

Time travel as a concept has been widely used as a vehicle for works about self-discovery, and The Time Travel, by placing this within a family context, and with a main character who moves forward in time and sees himself as a shiftless and dissolute character neglectful of family responsibilities, has moral instruction written all over it. Laugh, enjoy and leave the theater as a better person ... it all seems rather dated in a world engulfed in post-modern relativism. For all that, the drama arises from a strong social commitment, and this is what has given the performances of Taiwan Drama Performance their durability.

The Time Travel has completed a tour of southern Taiwan and will open at 7:30pm tonight at the Taipei City Family Theater (台北市親子劇場), 2F, 1 Shifu Rd, Taipei City (台北市市府路1號2樓). Performances are tomorrow and Sunday at 2:30pm and tomorrow at 7:30pm. Tickets are NT$250 to NT$1,200 and are available through ERA ticketing. There will be further performances at 2:30pm and 7:30pm on Jan. 5 at the Tsing Hua University (清華大學) auditorium located at 101, Kuangfu Rd Sec 2, Hsinchu City (新竹市光復路二段101號).
This story has been viewed 956 times.