Imagine working for months on a play and having only one person show up. Now imagine that as that one audience member, you are no longer just watching a play, but in it — the veil that separates observed from the observers is gone.
That was the concept behind Riverbed Theatre’s (河床劇團藝術總監) latest Taipei production, the Just for You Festival, held from Aug. 18 to Aug. 21. Four directors, 18 actors, four plays, seven performances a day for four days — all for just one person at a time.
If that was not enough to push some boundaries, the choice of venue was: several rooms on the second floor of Hotel Eight Zone (八方美學商旅) in downtown Taipei. One director used two rooms for his play, the other three kept to just one each — although even then the audience was expected to move around the room.
Photo Courtesy of Riverbed Theatre Company
“Riverbed is now 13 years old. The challenge is to do bigger, but also try to return to roots of human interaction. This was an opportunity to rethink the basic application of theater — breaking barriers,” Craig Quintero, Riverbed’s artistic director, said at a press conference the day before the festival opened.
“We wanted to do a show for one person. Taipei has lots of love hotels, but they are too prop-oriented. Taipei hotels are a second home for many people looking for privacy from small apartments,” Quintero said. “I’ve heard of others [companies, festivals] that have done such shows outdoors or in elementary schools, but the beds, soaps and everything here give a structure to the story. The space is the script.”
Quintero, back for the summer from his job as associate professor at Grinnell College in Iowa, was one of the four directors, alongside Hung Hung (鴻鴻), artistic director of Dark Eyes Performance Lab (黑眼睛跨劇團藝術總監), Riverbed manager Isaac Lai (賴志成), and company member Joyce Ho (何采柔), a visual artist who was making her directing debut.
Photo Courtesy of Riverbed Theatre Company
Tickets sold out in less than an hour when they went on sale on June 25, said Ho, who tried to forge links ahead of time with those going to see her play, Room 206 (206號房).
“My show is about chances, coincidence. I sent my audience letters about the story so I could connect with them before the show — one was sent a picture, another a key, another a picture puzzle,” she said.
While each play ran about 45 minutes, they diverged widely in terms of stories and cast size. Quintero used six actors in Amnesia (忘我), as did Ho for Room 206, while Lai’s Zip had four and Hung’s House on the Snow (屋上積雪) had just two — not counting a life-sized puppet. House on the Snow dealt with the very topical issues of nuclear energy and radiation fears, while the others were more abstract.
Photo Courtesy of Riverbed Theatre Company
“The audience sees a retired old man [the puppet] who lives alone in the hotel,” Hung said. “He was an engineer at a nuclear power station, but found his work was useless and dangerous. Now he has regrets, and he gives lectures about stopping nuclear power. But his family, his daughter can’t forgive him. The audience is like a visitor for the old man. The actress is his nurse; she talks to the visitor and gets them to help her move the puppet around.”
“The audience was required to interact with the actress from the very beginning, so motivating them and attracting their interest from the very beginning was a big challenge. I had to come up with many things for the audience to do [like answering the telephone],” Hung said.
Lai said his show, of which I was able to see a snippet, centered on a woman reminiscing about the loss of her father.
Photo Courtesy of Riverbed Theatre Company
As the audience, even for just about 10 minutes, it was slightly unsettling to be so close to the actors. The play began outside the hotel room, as a silent attendant had me sit on a stool, handed me a film canister containing a short strip of negatives with pictures of the actors and a YouTube link, then showed me a short video clip on an iPad. She then pulled two pieces of paper from her right cuff that had instructions in the form of graphics (do not sit on floor, etc). After I said I understood, she keyed open the door and I entered the play.
There was a woman in a dress laying on the far side of the bed, a vanity case on the opposite corner of the bed, a suitcase on rack below the TV, a small table with an airplane meal on it, and an armchair. As I sat in the chair, I could hear a recording of airline pilots chattering and after a few moments, the woman woke up and walked into the bathroom. To the sounds of splashing water she began to sing (1964’s The End of the World) to what sounded like live guitar music.
I was paralyzed with indecision. Should I get up and go to the bathroom or wait for her to come back? Just as I was about to move, the attendant entered the room and motioned for me to follow her into the bathroom, which was lit by a string of fairy lights. A man dressed in an air force uniform sat on one of two chairs next to bathtub, playing a guitar. The actress was perched on the right side of the tub, with a suitcase filled with cups and what looked like metal pipes balanced on a rack above the water. The attendant pulled a coin out of a pocket, offered a prayer and tossed the coin in the tub before handing me a second coin to do the same. A few more lines from the song and it was time for me to go.
I was sorry to leave, but the thought of staying for more was somewhat scary. I also kept thinking it was the biggest bathtub I had ever seen.
In traditional theater, the proscenium divides the actors and audience; even in non-conventional spaces, the stage area is usually delineated and the audience is kept at a distance. The Riverbed festival removed the veil between actor and audience.
For Quintero and his colleagues, that closeness and intensity was crucial to the performances — as was the uncertainty of how each viewer would react.
I caught up with Quintero on Aug. 23, two days after the festival, to ask how it went.
“It was fantastic, really great. A great test of stamina for performers to do seven shows a day. It was really something special for audiences, to become part of the show, not just be passive observers,” he said. “There were a couple of weird experiences — one guy who is a director of a puppet theater brought a flashlight and flashed it around the room. He didn’t want to move rooms when the actor wanted to lead him to the final room for the final scene.”
To help the audience members decompress after the show, Riverbed provided a comment book and also held a post-show discussion at the Urban Core Gallery on Aug. 22.
Quintero said many of those who wrote in the comments book left poetry, “really beautiful stuff,” and many said they wanted to see the plays again. About 25 audience members showed up for the discussion, and some spoke of how moving, even unsettling, they had found the experience.
“One woman who saw Hung Hung’s show, who was in her 40s or 50s and dealing with taking care of someone, found the issues from the show were very real and personal even though she tried to keep a distance from it. She said at home that night she broke down and cried,” Quintero said.
The actors also found it draining, he said, quoting actress Felicia Huang (黃婕菲): “You lead them [the audience] up to a high spot and then you leap off with them, a leap of faith, of trust. It was mentally challenging each time having to dig deep to reach that same moment [seven times a day].”
Riverbed is now working on a Just for You exhibition, which opens at Urban Core Gallery, 89-4, Zhonghua Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市中華路一段89-4號), on Sept. 17, with some of the props from the plays — including the “party” set Ho built on the balcony of her hotel room — as well as video clips and audience interviews. The show will be open daily from 12:30pm to 8:30pm through Oct. 2.
Riverbed’s next production will be Riz au Lait, from Dec. 29 to Dec. 31.
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