Winnie Chang (張詩盈) witnessed a horrific car accident one day while walking the streets of Taipei. She wanted to approach the vehicle to see if she could help, but the friend she was with insisted they keep going for fear the police might somehow implicate them in the accident.
Faced with the desire to help or to walk away, Chang chose the latter, a decision she still regrets. The accident served as the inspiration for her play Double-Faced Barbie (雙面芭比), playing this weekend at Guling Street Theater (牯嶺街小劇場).
The car accident was an epiphany for Chang because it brought to life in a dramatic way all the choices she had wanted to make in her life but never had the strength to do so.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF O THEATER
It also provided a different perspective on the script she was working on at the time — one that revolved around different aspects of Chang’s own personality and how, from an early age, she was torn between going her own way and conforming to the expectations of her teachers, family, and society in general.
The script in its original form, however, was going nowhere and Chang had the wherewithal to realize that the themes of peer, family and social pressure have been investigated countless times.
Double-Faced Barbie is, as the title suggests, a play about the different faces people are expected to wear in different situations. The play’s two characters are dressed to look like Barbie dolls — metaphorically showing that women in society are expected to look and act a certain way — and argue about a number of issues that the actresses, one dressed in black, the other white, take opposing views on. Each character is, in fact, one aspect of the same person.
As they argue, a car crash, similar to the accident that Chang witnessed in real life, is projected on to the stage, effectively breaking the Barbies out of their patterns of behavior and leading to the play’s denoument.
Double-Faced Barbie will be performed at Guling Street Theater (牯嶺街小劇場), 2, Ln 5 Guling St, Taipei City (台北市牯嶺街5巷2號), today and tomorrow at 7:30pm and tomorrow and Sunday at 2:30pm. NT$350 tickets are available through NTCH ticketing.
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