Playwrights write; directors direct; actors act; and audiences watch. But what if you are blind? To survive you must learn to operate in the dark. Such is the world of Susy Hendrix, the central protagonist in the Lab Space’s version of Frederick Knott’s Wait Until Dark, a play well staged and directed by Brook Hall and Ting Kao (高詩婷).
As the play opens, con men Mike Talman (Dan O’Shea) and Carlino (John Brownlie) have been lured to the apartment of Susy (Esther Veronin) and her husband Sam (Andrew Chau) when they are out. They have been brought there by a ruthless Harry Roat (Stewart Glen) to help find a heroin-stuffed doll that Sam inadvertently brought home without Susy’s knowledge. But now the doll is missing and Roat and company seek to keep Sam at a distance and con the recently blind Susy into helping them find the doll. So the game begins.
SUPERB CAST
Photo courtesy of Michael Lao
Veronin shines in the challenging lead role, where she must play to the voices of the other characters and project her own voice with a mixture of credible vulnerability and strength, so as to outwit the deadly con artists.
Matched well against Susy are three diverse heavies, the gruff Carlino, a smoother Talman and the sinister Roat who will stop at nothing to win. Susy can out-psyche Talman, but Roat is a different matter. You would not want him as a neighbor. Helping Susy is the petulant girl next door, Gloria (played in alternate performances by Angelina Chen (陳冠如) and Danielle Beuker), who at first complicates the con, but helps Suzy in the end.
Set designer Yang Chih-yi (楊之儀) makes excellent use of the venue’s flexible space to create a basement apartment, which adequately contains the action while still suggesting additional dimensions with an outside streetlight and the hint of a back bedroom.
Jenna Robinette (costumes) and Adam Dupuis (specialty props) embellish a strong 60s feeling while Anton Botes adds his intriguing and original sound track.
Staged in cooperation with the Taipei City Government’s Department of Cultural Affairs, this is a dramatic show well worth seeing.
This month the government ordered a one-year block of Xiaohongshu (小紅書) or Rednote, a Chinese social media platform with more than 3 million users in Taiwan. The government pointed to widespread fraud activity on the platform, along with cybersecurity failures. Officials said that they had reached out to the company and asked it to change. However, they received no response. The pro-China parties, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), immediately swung into action, denouncing the ban as an attack on free speech. This “free speech” claim was then echoed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC),
Exceptions to the rule are sometimes revealing. For a brief few years, there was an emerging ideological split between the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) that appeared to be pushing the DPP in a direction that would be considered more liberal, and the KMT more conservative. In the previous column, “The KMT-DPP’s bureaucrat-led developmental state” (Dec. 11, page 12), we examined how Taiwan’s democratic system developed, and how both the two main parties largely accepted a similar consensus on how Taiwan should be run domestically and did not split along the left-right lines more familiar in
Many people in Taiwan first learned about universal basic income (UBI) — the idea that the government should provide regular, no-strings-attached payments to each citizen — in 2019. While seeking the Democratic nomination for the 2020 US presidential election, Andrew Yang, a politician of Taiwanese descent, said that, if elected, he’d institute a UBI of US$1,000 per month to “get the economic boot off of people’s throats, allowing them to lift their heads up, breathe, and get excited for the future.” His campaign petered out, but the concept of UBI hasn’t gone away. Throughout the industrialized world, there are fears that
Most heroes are remembered for the battles they fought. Taiwan’s Black Bat Squadron is remembered for flying into Chinese airspace 838 times between 1953 and 1967, and for the 148 men whose sacrifice bought the intelligence that kept Taiwan secure. Two-thirds of the squadron died carrying out missions most people wouldn’t learn about for another 40 years. The squadron lost 15 aircraft and 148 crew members over those 14 years, making it the deadliest unit in Taiwan’s military history by casualty rate. They flew at night, often at low altitudes, straight into some of the most heavily defended airspace in Asia.
RSS