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A Zapatista in Iraq

PHOTO: COURTESY OF ASSIGNMENT THEATER

Assignment Theater’s (差事劇團) latest work blends two different conflicts that have been in the news over the past five years: the war in Iraq and the conflict in Chiapas, Mexico, between the Zapatistas and the Mexican government.

For Chung Chiao (鍾喬) the origins of both conflicts are symbols for the problems facing today’s world and are the inspiration for Into the Ruins (闖入，廢墟), a play he wrote and directed that begins tonight at the Tainan Human Theater Factory (台南人戲工場).

“We aren’t interested in creating illusions so much as breaking them,” he said.

One would have to ask, however, is there an illusion here that really needs to be broken?

The story is about a revolutionary poet who struggles to maintain his sanity in the face of the civil war raging all around him caused by a superpower’s lust for oil. Sound familiar?

His comrades have deserted him; the town where he makes his base no longer resembles anything from the 20th century, so ravaged it is from the occupiers’ bombs and civil war; his girlfriend leaves him for reasons that become clearer as the play progresses.

The hero of Into the Ruins is a revolutionary poet based on rebel Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos. PHOTO: COURTESY OF ASSIGNMENT THEATER

The poet’s guerilla tactics soon gain the attention of the occupiers who imprison him and force his former comrades-in-arms to guard him. In his greatest moment of despair, his former girlfriend returns and confronts him with the murder of her brother, a death he ordered.

The motive for the murder reveals the tough choices combatants face during war — a topic worthy of investigation — choices that inevitably come back to haunt the perpetrators.

Performance notes What: Into the Ruins (闖入，廢墟) Where: Tainan Human Theater Factory (台南人戲工場), 3F, 85, Shengli Rd, Tainan City (台南市勝利路85號3F) When: Today and tomorrow at 7:30pm; tomorrow and Sunday at 2:30pm Tickets: NT$300 and available through NTCH ticketing

Yet the play’s rather obvious message that corporate America is behind the destruction of states or countries — whether in the jungles of a southern Mexican state or in the deserts of Mesopotamia — is a mystery that was revealed long ago.
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