Barry Hall and Sarah Brooks, two stalwarts of the English-language theater and filmmaking community in Taipei for many years, teamed up to produce a Halloween treat for city residents this year.
Hall, a playwright and director, is founder and artistic director of the Elsewhere Theater Company, while Brooks has performed in several local productions over the past few years, and is associate producer for Empanada Loca, the company’s debut production.
Empanada Loca is a one-woman show written and directed by Aaron Marks for the New York City-based off-Broadway troupe, the LAByrinth Theater Company. Marks was inspired by Christopher Bond’s grisly 1973 play Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, which was turned into a musical a few years later by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler — and then a 2007 film by same name by Tim Burton.
Photo courtesy of Elsewhere Theater Company
While Sweeny Todd is the story of a barber who sought revenge on the corrupt judge who wrongfully sent him to prison and tore his family apart, achieved his goal with help from the owner of a struggling pie shop, Mark’s Empanada Loca is an updated urban myth set in the bowels of New York City — more specifically, its subway system.
The play tells the story of Dolores, a once-aspiring college student whose entanglement with a drug-selling boyfriend led to a 13-year stretch in prison, and, after being released, seeks to eke out a living by giving massages in the basement below an empanada shop owned by an old friend.
However, her plans don’t quite work out, and she becomes an accomplice to providing fresh meat to the shop, before a bloodbath sends her fleeing into the abandoned subway tunnels underneath Manhattan, where she takes refuge with the Mole People.
Leila Edmunds, a New Taipei City-based writer and voice-over talent, makes her stage acting debut as Dolores — as well as some of the people in Dolores’ life.
Aaron’s 2015 play earned some good reviews, including one from the New York Times, so given Hall’s track record — he wrote and directed Albert, Alex, Alice and the Inversion, a fast-paced comedic one-act in last year’s Taipei Shorts and the gripping Nuclear Family, featuring Brooks and DC Rapier in last month’s Taipei Shorts III — Empanada Loca is in good hands.
However, Hall and company are warning that due to the graphic content of the play, the production is not recommended for those under the age of 17.
As someone who still remembers getting nauseous watching a stage production of the Sondheim musical years ago — The Worst Pies in London song was a nightmare to sit through — prospective audience members of Empanada Loca this weekend might want to plan to go on an empty stomach.
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