“Things are not always what they seem,” says Tanya, the blonde.
If so, then how much self-deception enters the imaginings of our everyday lives?
Butterfly Effect’s production of Robert Hewett’s The Blonde, the Brunette and the Vengeful Redhead, presents this question and we, the audience, can only rely on the Roshomon Effect monologue stories of the seven characters, male and female, ranging from four to over 60.
Photo courtesy of Michael Geier and LAB Space
There is a death but who, how and why? Kim Chen (程鈺婷) is the tour de force storyteller taking on all roles and if you weren’t a fan of hers before taking your seat, you will be by play’s end.
Kim deftly personalizes the gestures, language and intonation of each of the seven in a tale that begins after Rhonda’s husband Graham has cowardly ended their seventeen-year marriage over the phone.
However, what makes Hewett’s play a gem for the audience is that even while enjoying the performance, we are forced to examine the isolation of everyman’s limited perceptions.
Photo courtesy of Michael Geier and LAB Space
Different pieces of the puzzle will come from each character, but it is only “years later” at play’s end that the never seen but previously mentioned Ellen brings resolution.
Time sequences and Chinese translations of dialogue are found on stage right. Yang Chih-yi’s (楊之儀) set, Jenna Robinette’s costumes and Anton Botes’ sound design skillfully keep pace with each changing monologue.
This summer classic is not to be missed.
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
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) controlled Executive Yuan (often called the Cabinet) finally fired back at the opposition-controlled Legislative Yuan in their ongoing struggle for control. The opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) acted surprised and outraged, but they should have seen it coming. Taiwan is now in a full-blown constitutional crisis. There are still peaceful ways out of this conflict, but with the KMT and TPP leadership in the hands of hardliners and the DPP having lost all patience, there is an alarming chance things could spiral out of control, threatening Taiwan’s democracy. This is no
RSS