The days of the veterans’ village are now numbered, with the majority having fallen to slum clearances or urban redevelopment. They may be gone, but they are certainly not forgotten, not least because there is a significant group of creative people in Taiwan who trace their roots back to these communities. One of these is Wang Wei-chung (王偉忠), a prolific television producer and the man behind a slew of hugely popular programs from Everybody Speaks Nonsense (全民亂講) in 2001 to One Million Star (超級星光大道).
Wang has been active in preserving and recording the vanishing culture of the veterans’ villages. His most recent effort is The Village (寶島一村), directed by Stan Lai (賴聲川) of the Performance Workshop and featuring a veritable Who’s Who of talent from stage, screen and television. Tickets for the 10-day Taipei run sold out a month ago, a rare feat for a stage drama, and a testament both to the production’s star draw, but probably more importantly, to the lingering nostalgia for the dilapidated yet vibrant communities that did so much to shape modern Taiwan.
“Why has the box office been so good?” Wang asked rhetorically during a press conference yesterday. “Well, we have the disappearance of the veterans’ villages to thank for that,” he replied half jokingly.
The play tells the story of three families living in the Formosa No. 1 Village in Chiayi County and is very much a laughter-and-tears melodrama, a remarkably traditional format for a director of Lai’s stature and reputation. It is strait-up proscenium stuff with elaborate sets and costumes, plenty of characters and three scenes that depict “the village” first from 1949 to 1950, then between 1968 and 1975 and bringing the story up to the present day, covering the period between 1987 and 2007. Wang will act as narrator for as many of the performances as his busy schedule will permit, underscoring the very personal nature of this production.
With such figures as Wang and Lai at the helm, it is not surprising that the performance stars some of the biggest names in Taiwanese television and theater, many of whom, like cross-talk artist Feng Yi-gang (馮翊綱), grew up in veterans’ villages.
“For every four or five people in Taiwan,” at least one has had some association with veterans’ villages,” Wang said. Even Hu Ting-ting (胡婷婷), who has returned from an acting career in the UK and US, said that while being too young to experience the life of the veterans’ villages, she had close associations with the communities through her father, Taichung Mayor Jason Hu (胡志強). Hu, who has a solid background as a stage actress, is perhaps, somewhat unfortunately, best-known to Western audiences from her performance as a Thai prostitute who has a run-in with Hugh Grant in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.
There are plenty of other famous names gracing the billboard, and it is to see them perform in a re-creation of communities that represented many of the conflicts and, more importantly, the ambitions and camaraderie that these communities created, that has brought out the theater-going public in such force. Performance Workshop announced yesterday that such has been the demand for tickets that the show will return to Taiwan for additional performances at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in February of next year.
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