Valentine’s Day is around the corner and the LAB Space is putting on a one-time performance of A. R. Gurney’s Love Letters tomorrow evening.
The story follows two close friends, Andrew Makepeace III and Melissa Gardner, through their correspondence from awkward childhood birthday card notes, to summer camp postcards, on to letters from boarding school, college and afterwards as he talks more of things and she of feelings. Fate pulls them apart. He goes off to war; both marry other people but despite the distance, they maintain their written correspondence — that is, until tragedy hits.
This is a show to take that significant other to or the one that you intend to be such. It’s a play to not only enjoy but also to discuss long afterwards.
Photo courtesy of The LAB Space
The challenge for the actors is to respond with a full range of emotions to each received epistle, especially when such letters cross in the mail.
Taiwanese-American singer-songwriter Lara Veronin (梁心頤) and Paul Whiteley, who recently played the phantom in the international tour of the Phantom of the Opera star. After the performance, Veronin and Whiteley will entertain the audience with cabaret songs. Admission tickets include a table for two, some bubbly and chocolate.
Photo courtesy of The LAB Space
Feb. 9 to Feb.15 Growing up in the 1980s, Pan Wen-li (潘文立) was repeatedly told in elementary school that his family could not have originated in Taipei. At the time, there was a lack of understanding of Pingpu (plains Indigenous) peoples, who had mostly assimilated to Han-Taiwanese society and had no official recognition. Students were required to list their ancestral homes then, and when Pan wrote “Taipei,” his teacher rejected it as impossible. His father, an elder of the Ketagalan-founded Independence Presbyterian Church in Xinbeitou (自立長老會新北投教會), insisted that their family had always lived in the area. But under postwar
In 2012, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) heroically seized residences belonging to the family of former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “purchased with the proceeds of alleged bribes,” the DOJ announcement said. “Alleged” was enough. Strangely, the DOJ remains unmoved by the any of the extensive illegality of the two Leninist authoritarian parties that held power in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan. If only Chen had run a one-party state that imprisoned, tortured and murdered its opponents, his property would have been completely safe from DOJ action. I must also note two things in the interests of completeness.
Taiwan is especially vulnerable to climate change. The surrounding seas are rising at twice the global rate, extreme heat is becoming a serious problem in the country’s cities, and typhoons are growing less frequent (resulting in droughts) but more destructive. Yet young Taiwanese, according to interviewees who often discuss such issues with this demographic, seldom show signs of climate anxiety, despite their teachers being convinced that humanity has a great deal to worry about. Climate anxiety or eco-anxiety isn’t a psychological disorder recognized by diagnostic manuals, but that doesn’t make it any less real to those who have a chronic and
When Bilahari Kausikan defines Singapore as a small country “whose ability to influence events outside its borders is always limited but never completely non-existent,” we wish we could say the same about Taiwan. In a little book called The Myth of the Asian Century, he demolishes a number of preconceived ideas that shackle Taiwan’s self-confidence in its own agency. Kausikan worked for almost 40 years at Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, reaching the position of permanent secretary: saying that he knows what he is talking about is an understatement. He was in charge of foreign affairs in a pivotal place in
RSS