[THE WEEKENDER]: 'K24 Chaos' loses steam in its later acts

PHOTO COURTESY OF TAINANER ENSEMBLE

Tainaner Ensemble's (台南人劇團) latest production, K24 Chaos is a six-hour play within a play that incorporates Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and employs a plotline similar to the television series Alias. It may seem strange to combine a love story using elements from a spy serial, but Tsai Po-chang's (蔡柏璋) script makes an admirable attempt.

At least for the first two acts, or episodes, as Tsai calls them, he pulls it off. Both staging and acting are tight and the story intricate and intriguing.

These acts were originally written two years ago for a festival on Matsu Island and the comedy really only needed one more episode to bring it to a conclusion.

In the play, rehearsals for the staging of Shakespeare's famous tragedy are interrupted by the mysterious disappearance of an actress and the uncovering of a plot to assassinate the president's daughter, who plays the leading role of Juliet.

The first two episodes work because the disappearance in the first leads to the casting of a male undercover agent who has to learn to play the role of a woman - helped along with great humor by a transvestite - in the second.

Tainaner Ensemble's K24 Chaos was a unique, onstage series - for the first few "episodes."  PHOTO COURTESY OF TAINANER ENSEMBLE

Throughout the plot, allusions to Taiwan's celebrity-obsessed culture and the media environment that props it up, along with plot twists and a suspenseful score kept the story moving at a fast past and the audience laughing out loud.

The rotating circular stage was used to brilliant effect because the audience was privy to the backstage machinations of the plotters and petty infighting of the actors.

But the intriguing beginning largely falls apart in the third episode because the script tries to incorporate too many diverse plots into the story. Though the jokes and plot twists remain, Tsai's script would have been better served if he had solved the mystery three hours earlier.