The National Theater Concert Hall’s New Ideas Drama two-production series opens tonight at the Experimental Theater in Taipei with director Liu Shou-you’s (劉守曜) My Baby Doll (我的洋娃娃).
A rather fantastical adaptation of US playwright Tennessee Williams’ 1946 one-act play 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, My Baby Doll premiered at the Director’s Festival at last year’s Toga Asian Arts Festival in Japan.
Williams’ Mississippi Delta comedy tells the story of Jake, the shady middle-aged owner of a cotton gin who burns down a rival’s new mill. The owner of the burned mill, Silva, is sure that he knows who committed the crime, but cannot prove it, and so he decides to get revenge by seducing Jake’s beautiful, frail, but not-too-bright young wife, Flora.
Photo courtesy of National Theater Concert Hall
Liu’s Mandarin adaptation has updated and transplanted Williams’ story to a multinational toy factory, where Silva is a young supervisor of the factory and Jake an avaricious businessman. As Silva investigates a fire at his factory, the relationship between the three becomes increasingly entangled.
Rather that setting the play in a factory or a home, Liu has created a fantasy set, filled with 1,500 balloons, stuffed lions, a seesaw... and the riding crop that figured so prominently in Williams’ original. This is fitting, since Liu sees the play as an adult fairy tale.
The story centers on three key human emotions — greed, lust and violence — and examines gender roles and the politics of flirting and desire. However, given the advances that women have made in the decades since Williams wrote the play, the Flora character has more education and autonomy than the original, whose life was under the control of her husband — yet she still faces many of the same entanglements.
The play features Grace Lu (呂曼茵) as Flora, An Yuan-liang (安原良) as Silva and Huang Yi-yong (黃毅勇), who is more often seen performing with the National GuoGuang Opera Company (國立國光劇團), as the scheming husband.
My Baby Doll is presented through special arrangement with the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee, which holds the literary rights to Williams’ work.
ANOTHER FAIRY TALE
The second production in the New Ideas Drama series, Die arabische Nacht (Arabian Night, 阿拉伯之夜), features the translation of a tale from a contemporary playwright, Roland Schimmelpfennig, the 48-year-old house author at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg.
The acclaimed 2001 play, another fairy tale for adults, will be performed at the Experimental Theater next weekend, directed by Liao Ruo-han (廖若涵).
It tells the story of five people in a high-rise building where the water system has broken down on a summer night. It centers on a young woman who remembers nothing, including that she was once an Arabian princess. She falls asleep on a sofa and three men try to wake her with a kiss, but one ends up trapped like a genie in a bottle, another is murdered by a jealous lover and the third, the oldest, appears to have the magic kiss needed to wake the sleeping princess.
All four shows for Die arabische Nacht are already sold out.
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