Love in all its comedic misunderstandings, giddiness and imperfections is at the heart of the Performance Workshop’s (表演工作坊) 30th anniversary production, A Blurry Kind of Love (愛朦朧,人朦朧), which opened at Taipei’s Metropolitan Hall last night following its premiere in Taoyuan on Sept. 26.
Written and directed by Ismene Ting (丁乃箏), A Blurry Kind of Love is a loose adaptation of 18th century French playwright Pierre de Marivaux’s Le Jeu de l’amour et du hazard (The Game of Love and Chance), a three-act comedy of mistaken identities, and the latest in the long line of European classic comedies that Performance Workshop has adapted.
Ting has updated the French classic — but only as far as the 1970s — for she also drew upon the kitschy aesthetics of popular Taiwan-based author Chiung Yao (瓊瑤), whose sentimental romances have been central to Taiwanese film and television shows since that decade. The set designs by Fang Iuan-kai (房元凱) and costumes by Klintonn Ke (柯林頓) also reflect a very ‘70s sensibility.
Photo Courtesy of Performance Workshop
Ting, an actress, playwright, director and filmmaker, has been a mainstay of Performance Workshop since its founding. Her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley in comparative literature provided a strong foundation for the many adaptations of foreign classics into Chinese, as with this latest show.
Marivaux’s play tells the story of a young woman who is engaged to a man she has never met, but who is coming for visit. Hoping to learn more about him than she would in the strictly regimented formal encounters appropriate to her station, she and her servant trade places. However, it turns out that her fiance had the same idea and has traded places with his valent, making for a perfect comedy of errors before true love triumphs.
Ting’s adaptation is set in a Yangmingshan villa that is home to a very wealthy family, with a father desperate to marry off his daughter, Mon Mon, before she turns into a spinster. A blind date is arranged with the man her father wants her to marry. Mon Mon trades places with her servant, Little Ding, and disguises herself, not knowing the young man, Sir Lone, has traded places with his chauffeur, Old Deng, to better observe his intended.
Photo Courtesy of Performance Workshop
The cast included some of the finest actors and comedians of the local theater world — Liu Mei-yu (劉美鈺) as Mon Mon, Tao Chuang-chen (陶傳正) as her father, Fan Kuang-yao (樊光耀) as Sir Lone, Chu Chung-heng (屈中恆), Tseng Hsin-hui (曾馨慧) — alongside Ella Chen (陳嘉樺) of the pop group S.H.E., who plays Little Ding.
Performance Workshop productions have always been something of a family affair and its latest show is no different. The company was founded in 1984 by playwright and director Stan Lai (賴聲川), who continues to serve as the troupe’s artistic director. His actress wife, Ding Nai-chu (丁乃竺), is managing director of the company and has produced most of her husband’s plays. She is also the sister of Ismene Ting.
Lai contributed the music to A Blurry Kind of Love, including the score for the play’s theme song. Ting’s husband, former ICRT DJ Tony Taylor, also contributed on the music front.
The company will also give two performances of A Blurry Kind of Love in Taichung on Saturday next week and then restage the production in Tainan at the end of January.
This story has been amended since it was first published to correct the Chinese name of set designer Fang Iuan-kai.
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