What can you accomplish in 14 weeks? In idle hands, a season can easily pass in aimless fun. In the case of Mitch, he learns to love again.
Tuesdays With Morrie (最後14堂星期二的課), Godot Theater’s Chinese-language adaptation of Mitch Albom’s 1997 best-selling novel, is being performed at Taipei’s Metropolitan Hall (台北市社教館城市舞台) until March 11, before moving to the Taichung Chungshan Hall (台中市中山堂) on March 17 and March 18.
Since its premiere last month, the popular tear-jerker has clocked up more than 40 shows, and this is its fifth revival.
Photo Courtesy of Godot Theater
The production will move to Shanghai after its Taiwan run.
Directed by Daniel Yang (楊世彭), the production boasts theater thespian Chin Shih-chieh (金士傑) and popular TV actor Pu Hsueh-liang (卜學亮) in the leads.
Adapted from Albom’s autobiographical novel, the play follows the hotshot journalist Mitch as he reconnects with his college mentor Morrie.
Because Morrie is dying from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a progressive disease of the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord that control voluntary muscle movement, Mitch opts to meet him every Tuesday for heart-to-heart conversations for 14 weeks.
The book has sold 14 million copies worldwide and was turned into an Emmy-winning TV movie by Oprah Winfrey in 2000. The book’s Chinese edition has sold more than 700,000 copies in Taiwan.
“This production has been an unexpected hit,” Yang told the Taipei Times in an interview on Thursday last week. “I approached Godot Theater about this heart-moving play and said it might lose money, but it actually became a crowd drawer.”
As the latest mentor/protege heart-warmer in the vein of Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, this inspirational play’s unflinching depiction of death tackles the taboo surrounding the topic.
“The story covers marriage, family, father-and-son relationships and friendship,” Yang said. “Everyone will find something to relate to. The audiences really react to the performance and the story.”
At the heart of the story is the long series of candid chats on topics ranging from life to love. Because of its empowering theme, the play has been dubbed “chicken soup” theater in China.
“Most audiences have read or heard about this book and they come expecting an elevating experience,” Yang said. “The lessons between Mitch and Morrie are over, but our lessons with the audiences continue.”
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ！). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
RSS