Staged readings are a liminal period for new plays in development. For rough ideas, they can be a lab where writings go through trial and error; for mature works, they can be a springboard to a bigger stage as a more formal production. Because of this in-betweenness, many playwrights and new play development centers have incorporated staged readings as part of the writing process.
Poster of the 2024 Prologue New Play Festival. Photo courtesy of Aaron Liau.
However, in Taiwan, it seems that theatre-makers have yet to discover the benefits of staged readings, and plays are often rushed into rehearsals and productions. Seeing that the value of staged readings is underestimated, the Prologue Center for New Plays has organized the Prologue New Play Festival with the support of Believe in Next Generation, a Taipei-based non-profit organization. In the festival, new plays will meet their audiences for the first time in the form of staged readings.
This year, from September to December, four new plays will be presented at the festival: Whitewashed by Chester Tsai, Chronicle of Exile: Who Am I? by Chen-Wei Kuo, Two Women, One Man and a Pot of Tomato Potato Soup by Carman from Macau, and The Knife by Ihot Sinlay Cihek. “The Images of Me” being the theme, the four new plays are all attempts in response to the ever-asked question, “Who am I?” Some playwrights inspect the question through a racial and gender lens, while others do so by highlighting the fluidity of identity in their plays.
Whitewashed by Chester Tsai
When Disney announced Halle Bailey as Ariel for its remake of The Little Mermaid, the casting stirred backlash among Taiwanese netizens. Some sneered at the implied wokeism, and others lamented over their childhood memories. This reaction, to Tsai, seemed disturbing. He wondered how Taiwan, a country often oppressed in terms of international relations, could also tolerate hate speeches against a black actor. To switch between the roles of the predator and the prey, what stories do the internet trolls tell themselves? The event triggered him to write a play to explore their psychology. Whitewashed it is.
The play recounts the life of Nick, a boy surrounded by toxic relationships. His mother will not tell him bedtime stories before she dies too young, his father is a politician who manipulates him to get elected, and his girlfriend-turned-wife is a novelist who always plays the victim in their marriage. Unhappy about his villain roles, he wants to tell his own story where he can be whitewashed as the promising son and the loving prince. Yet, Nick has to realize that even storytelling carries a risk: when storytellers are too entrapped, stories can bring crises.
Whitewashed explores how storytelling shapes personal identity. To show the power of storytelling, Tsai weaves multiple stories into his writing, making the play a meta-story. Besides the life story of Nick, “The Birds, the Beasts, and the Bat” from Aesop’s Fables and the short stories by Nick’s wife Sophie are also embedded. Unwrapping the play is like opening Russian dolls. When the last doll pops out, it is like Tsai asking the audience, “Now, which Nick is the real Nick?”
Chronicle of Exile: Who Am I? by Chen-Wei Kuo
Chronicle of Exile was first written as an assignment in graduate school. The writing process reminded the playwright, Kuo, of the foreign workers who kept him company as a child raised in an old, rusted metal shed factory, so he felt an obligation to revise the play to its finest. He submitted the play to the World Sinophone Drama Competition for Young Playwrights in 2021, where it took home second prize.
The play follows a Taiwanese teenage boy on a journey to find his biological mother. On the way, he bumps into an Indonesian-born Taiwanese girl on the run. She claims that her Taiwan passport has expired, and without renewing it, she has become an illegal immigrant to the country. Resolved to help her, the boy must hide from the police manhunt, while at the same time finding his own mother.
Chronicle of Exile challenges the traditional belief that identities are solely decided by government-issued identifications, and asks how nationality takes part in the formation of personal identity. Kuo handles these themes with bold forms. He employs dual roles, repetitive narration, and even puppetry in the play. Though the techniques may seem bewildering, they are all approaches to reminding the audience that the answer to “Who am I?” is never definitive.
Photo of the Chronicle of Exile: Who Am I?. Courtesy of Aaron Liau.
Two Women, One Man and a Pot of Tomato Potato Soup by Carman
Having a day job in the journalism industry, Carman, a playwright from Macau, often finds herself walking a thin line between reporting the truth and fabricating stories. Therefore, when it was time to write her first play, she decided to investigate how ambiguity and misunderstandings are created when personal experiences are made into news reports. Inspired by Hansel and Gretel, she wrote the play Two Women, One Man and a Pot of Tomato Potato Soup.
Two sisters are locked up by their rapist brother. To break free, they decide to kill and cook him. Yet, when the self-defense story hits the headline, it becomes a murder case, and audiences react in different ways. Some see it as lunchtime entertainment, some use it as a pickup line, and some retell it as a cautionary tale. As the story is retold and reshaped, different versions of realities are created.
The play captures how personal experiences are ignored when they are turned into news reports or other forms of narratives. The two sisters, who are victims of sexual assault and have their own views of what has happened, are ripped of subjectivity and known only as characters in press coverage. Sadly, in an age when information is transmitted and labels are tagged too quickly, rumors and gossip often create an impression for someone before they have the voice to present themselves.
Photo of Two Women, One Man and a Pot of Tomato Potato Soup. Courtesy of Aaron Liau.
The Knife by Ihot Sinlay Cihek
Ihot Sinlay Cihek is an Indigenous theatre artist. Traveling a lot between Taipei and Hualien, a city in eastern Taiwan, the land of Pangcah people, and most importantly where she was born and raised, she is often inspired by the incongruence of indigenous experience and urban life. When she writes, she often centers on indigenous women who find themselves trapped in a patriarchal system, and reveals the conflicts minorities face through humor and irony. Her works were once nominated for the Taishin Arts Award, a nationwide award that covers visual, performing, and interdisciplinary arts. In her latest play, The Knife, Ihot keeps showing the pain and glory of an Indigenous woman living in the modern world,
Sawmah is a Pangcah woman who has just buried her grandfather. She misses him so much that she has sneaked his hunting knife, or hawan, out from his coffin. While she is overjoyed at her cleverness, her father calls and tells her that it is a Pangcah taboo for women to touch or cross over hunting knives. Now, the knife is lying at her door, and no matter who she calls, no one is coming to her rescue. She does not know what to do.
Ihot delves into the intersectionality of race and gender in The Knife. In the city, Sawmah faces racial discrimination. When she is back with her people, nevertheless, the Pangcah tribe still fails to provide comfort, and inside the racial minority group she faces gender oppression. When Ihot embodies all the characters in the solo performance, not only does she show her audience what it means to be an Indigenous woman, but she liberates herself from the racial and gender patriarchal structure that holds her captive.
Photo of The Knife. Courtesy of Ihot Sinlay Cihek.
“Know Thyself” was carved upon the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. The words are a reminder for all humankind as well as a torch that lights up playwrights’ paths. In view of getting to the bottom of the question “Who am I?,” the four playwrights have provided different voices along with unique dramatic forms in their respective plays.
In this era when plays are rushed into productions and humanity is easily defined by digital content, maybe it is the best time now for both playwrights and audiences to pace down and reconsider “Who am I?” That is why the Prologue Center for New Plays has launched a series of staged readings through the 2024 Prologue New Play Festival. With it, playwrights can take time to write and revise, and audiences can wait for the magic of theatre, which has gradually dissolved in many performances nowadays.
(Kuan-Ting Lin is a translator and dramaturg based in Taiwan, and currently serves as the Literary Manager at the Prologue Center for New Plays.)
Poster 2 of the 2024 Prologue New Play Festival
This post was written by the author in their personal capacity.The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, their staff or collaborators.
This post was written by Kuan-Ting Lin.
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