The LAB Space kicks off the year with David Ives’ delightful comedy Shorts.
Ives, a prolific American playwright, is best known for his clever one-act plays that highlight the interplay of language, existential imagination, word play conundrums and more.
The six “shorts” were chosen by directors Ting Kao (高詩婷) and Andrew Chau (周厚安).
Photo courtesy of Cheng Yi-lee
Who would not wish for a reset button for conversations that go awry? In the Sure Thing, a man and a woman meeting for the first time have that luck. Each time their conversation turns negative, a bell rings and they must start again.
With Degas, C’est moi, a man wakes up one morning and decides he should be the great French Impressionist painter Edgar Degas. But is the world ready for him?
In The Philadelphia, a different man finds himself in a twilight zone where he discovers that he can only get what he wants by asking for the opposite.
The Russian revolutionary Trotsky finds himself being killed over and over again in Variations on the Death of Trotsky. However it is in his conversations with his assassin that he is able to come up with memorable profound statements.
A scam artist invents a new imaginary language, Unamunda, and charges people to learn it in The Universal Language. All goes well until he falls in love with one of his students.
Words, Words, Words. Three chimpanzees named Milton, Swift and Kafka are locked in a room with typewriters to hopefully create Shakespeare’s Hamlet through their random typing. What they discuss while doing this is the key.
This production sees the returning faces of Victor Stevenson (Tuesdays with Morrie) and Sharon Landon (A Perfect Ganesh) from last year. Season tickets are available at: www.accupass.com/go/lab2016
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless