Lab Space kicks of this season with an engaging Theater Ignite production of Kristen Thomson’s challenging I, Claudia. This one actor tour-de-force will leave you laughing sympathetically for the lost dreams of each character.
Derek Kwan (關顯揚) stars as the one who must pull off four different roles (two male and two female). Each requires a different voice, mood and emotion as all subtly or not so subtly reveal their “shit luck” experiences with life.
The main protagonist is Claudia, an emotional pre-teen who draws most of our sympathy. Her life is on overload as she copes with puberty, her parents’ divorce, lack of popularity at school and a failing science project.
Photo courtesy of JJ Chen
The school custodian, Drachman, allows Claudia to use the basement as a hideaway to sort out her troubles. Before he immigrated to Canada, he dreamed of being an actor, but premature baldness at age twenty-two cut that short. He closes the play with a folk tale of wisdom gained through tears of disappointment.
As Douglas, Claudia’s aging grandfather, Kwan has to slow down. Douglas loves Claudia but is lost in his own grief over the recent death of his wife.
And then there is Leslie, the party girl, who after dating several assholes lands David, Claudia’s father. She has bounced through life with little heed for the destruction in her wake but she feels her upcoming marriage will be a way to thumb her nose at her relations and show them she got it right in the end.
Separate masks for each character along with simple costume changes allow Kwan to masterfully focus on the required multiple changes of temperament.
Claudia’s parents are unseen but like any child who has experienced divorce, she hopes to bring them back together. We delight in her honesty and simple judgment yet feel for her pain.
The canonical shot of an East Asian city is a night skyline studded with towering apartment and office buildings, bright with neon and plastic signage, a landscape of energy and modernity. Another classic image is the same city seen from above, in which identical apartment towers march across the city, spilling out over nearby geography, like stylized soldiers colonizing new territory in a board game. Densely populated dynamic conurbations of money, technological innovation and convenience, it is hard to see the cities of East Asia as what they truly are: necropolises. Why is this? The East Asian development model, with
Desperate dads meet in car parks to exchange packets; exhausted parents slip it into their kids’ drinks; families wait months for prescriptions buy it “off label.” But is it worth the risk? “The first time I gave him a gummy, I thought, ‘Oh my God, have I killed him?’ He just passed out in front of the TV. That never happens.” Jen remembers giving her son, David, six, melatonin to help him sleep. She got them from a friend, a pediatrician who gave them to her own child. “It was sort of hilarious. She had half a tub of gummies,
The wide-screen spectacle of Formula One gets a gleaming, rip-roaring workout in Joseph Kosinski’s F1, a fine-tuned machine of a movie that, in its most riveting racing scenes, approaches a kind of high-speed splendor. Kosinski, who last endeavored to put moviegoers in the seat of a fighter jet in Top Gun: Maverick, has moved to the open cockpits of Formula One with much the same affection, if not outright need, for speed. A lot of the same team is back. Jerry Bruckheimer produces. Ehren Kruger, a co-writer on Maverick, takes sole credit here. Hans Zimmer, a co-composer previously, supplies the thumping
There is an old British curse, “may you live in interesting times,” passed off as ancient Chinese wisdom to make it sound more exotic and profound. We are living in interesting times. From US President Donald Trump’s decision on American tariffs, to how the recalls will play out, to uncertainty about how events are evolving in China, we can do nothing more than wait with bated breath. At the cusp of potentially momentous change, it is a good time to take stock of the current state of Taiwan’s political parties. As things stand, all three major parties are struggling. For our examination of the
RSS