Fresh of off its surprisingly successful debut performance this spring, the Taipei Players acting troupe is back for more.
In March, the group presented 7 Stories in front of a sold-out audience at Bliss. The upstairs live house space was transformed into a mini-theater for 50 seated guests. “I think it was a really great response from the audience,” said organizer Sarah Zittrer, who found the community support “overwhelming.”
On Sunday, this “eclectic group of actors, musicians, and yoga teachers” will present five comedies, said Zittrer. Each short is from 10 to 20 minutes in length.
Oral Report and Alternative Lifestyle is a double comedy by Jack Neary about three old ladies gossiping on the porch. It features Katie Partlow, and organizers Zittrer and Mandy Roveda.
Roveda, who directs four of the five plays in Sunday’s show, arrived in Taiwan last August. “I have to do theater no matter where I am,” she said.
Actors Klaire Wu (吳青樺), Ben Lind and Peter Balfry perform in Time Flies, David Ives’ comedy about two mayflies on a date who discover they don’t have long
to live.
Men Are From Milwaukee, Women Are From Phoenix, by M. Lynda Robinson, performed by Brian Domenget and Holly Harrington, uses an argument between a married couple to lampoon the book Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus and the lack of communication between the sexes.
Anton Chekhov’s The Bear is the only play not directed by Roveda, with Josh Myers taking the reins in this story of a grieving widow and the landowner
her husband was indebted to. The piece features
Taichung Improv Theater members Jenny McManus
and Nick Ford.
Dec. 16 to Dec. 22 Growing up in the 1930s, Huang Lin Yu-feng (黃林玉鳳) often used the “fragrance machine” at Ximen Market (西門市場) so that she could go shopping while smelling nice. The contraption, about the size of a photo booth, sprayed perfume for a coin or two and was one of the trendy bazaar’s cutting-edge features. Known today as the Red House (西門紅樓), the market also boasted the coldest fridges, and offered delivery service late into the night during peak summer hours. The most fashionable goods from Japan, Europe and the US were found here, and it buzzed with activity
During the Japanese colonial era, remote mountain villages were almost exclusively populated by indigenous residents. Deep in the mountains of Chiayi County, however, was a settlement of Hakka families who braved the harsh living conditions and relative isolation to eke out a living processing camphor. As the industry declined, the village’s homes and offices were abandoned one by one, leaving us with a glimpse of a lifestyle that no longer exists. Even today, it takes between four and six hours to walk in to Baisyue Village (白雪村), and the village is so far up in the Chiayi mountains that it’s actually
These days, CJ Chen (陳崇仁) can be found driving a taxi in and around Hualien. As a way to earn a living, it’s not his first choice. He’d rather be taking tourists to the region’s attractions, but after a 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck the region on April 3, demand for driver-guides collapsed. In the eight months since the quake, the number of overseas tourists visiting Hualien has declined by “at least 90 percent, because most of them come for Taroko Gorge, not for the east coast or the East Longitudinal Valley,” he says. Chen estimates the drop in domestic sightseers after the
It’s a discombobulating experience, after a Lord of the Rings trilogy that was built, down to every frame and hobbit hair, for the big screen, to see something so comparatively minor, small-scaled and TV-sized as The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim. The film, set 183 years before the events of The Hobbit, is a return to Middle-earth that, despite some very earnest storytelling, never supplies much of an answer as to why, exactly, it exists. Rohirrim, which sounds a little like the sound an orc might make sneezing, is perhaps best understood as a placeholder for further cinematic
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