Since founding the Body Phase Studio (身體氣象館) in 1992, theater critic and director Wang Mo-lin’s (王墨林) productions have focused on cross-cultural communication, especially physical communication, and humanity’s dark side.
In 2011, the company worked with French director Franck Dimech on a production of German playwright Georg Buchner’s Woyzeck, which is about the dehumanizing effect of military life on a young man. Last fall the company was in the Experimental Theater in Taipei performing Journal de la terreur (殘酷日誌), a collaboration with French theater director and writer Fabrice Dupuy about humanity in wartime, as part of the National Theater Concert Hall’s International Theater Festival.
Next week they are back in the black box with Wall of Fog (長夜漫漫路迢迢) as part of the Taiwan International Festival of Arts, with another dark-themed work.
Photo courtesy of Body Phase Studio and NTCH
Wall of Fog is a re-examination of US playwright Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece Long Day’s Journey into Night, which Wang created for the 24th Macao Arts Festival in May 2013 to mark the 60th anniversary of O’Neill’s death.
The semi-autobiographical Long Day’s Journey into Night won O’Neill, a Nobel laureate in literature, a fourth, posthumous Pulitzer Prize.
It examines the day in the life of the four-member Tyrone family of Connecticut, who are plagued by addictions, depression, illnesses and financial woes. Their home is no refugee from the outside world, but a battleground of secrets and manipulations, love and hate, shifting alliances and complex relationships.
For O’Neill’s characters, home is a place that they are desperate to escape, but also one that they need to survive.
Words are never as wounding as those that come from those we love.
Although Wang uses a greater number of actors than O’Neill’s work, he has kept the sense of claustrophobia that characterizes Long Day’s Journey into Night, something the confined space of the Experimental Theater will surely enhance.
The Macau production featured six actors from Taiwan and Macau and ran for two hours with no intermission (O’Neill’s plays are not known for being short).
Wang has reworked the production for Taipei and the company’s Asian tour, shortening it by a half-hour, but still foregoing an intermission. It will be performed in English, with Chinese subtitles.
There will be a post-performance talk by director and cast after Saturday’s matinee.
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