Theater With a Bite
Summarized by: Lomar Tan, July 7, 2007
EROTIC GASPS ECHO THROUGH the theater as a spotlight
picks out the figure of a woman, wearing black stockings, a low-cut dress and high heels. Writhing and moaning, she is atop the man she suspects of killing her sister. Later in the play she meets the same fate, while the murderer delivers a speech on Christianity that degenerates into pantomime. Says Chen Mei-mao, the author and producer of Bring Me Someplace Else: "Love is a cliché. I'm interested in desire." Playwright Chen, 28, is the director of the Taiwan Walker Theater, one of ten or so "underground" drama troupes in Taipei. Over the years, their development has been hampered by tiny budgets and
government disapproval. Even so, they have managed to survive - and retain their audiences - by coming up with creative solutions. A big headache is finding places in which to perform. None of Taipei's theaters is open to
experimental drama. "They all belong to the government," says Jan Huey-ling, a leading actress in the group Critical Point Theater Phenomenon, which rents a derelict building in Wan-hua, Taipei's oldest district. To help make ends meet, it sublets some floors as homes and offices. Many of the group's actors earn less than $20 a performance. Such enterprise gives Critical Point the independence it needs to present bold plays. When it wanted to stage one about the founder of the Taiwan communist party, government theaters turned it down. "They said, 'What? You want to do a play about a communist? No way!' " Jan recalls. The group staged it in a private theater. The underground troupes wish to break more than political taboos. "We wanted to perform in the nude," says Jan. "But because we were still students, school authorities got wind of it and opposed it. Newspapers started to write about it, and our parents, classmates and teachers all learned of it. Because of pressure from them, we couldn't go ahead." Performers used to face very different constraints. A decade ago, government censorship reached every aspect of theater. Before Taiwan's political liberalization of the mid-1980s, all scripts were screened by the Ministry of Education and all performances had to be registered. "There wasn't even a formal way to apply to perform in a school auditorium," says Lee Huan-hsiung, founder of Left Bank, one of the island's earliest experimental groups. Left Bank's first show was unauthorized, staged in a supporter's unfinished apartment. It "had a lot of monologue and no plot," says Lee, but drew a surprisingly large audience. "Even the balcony was full," he recalls proudly. Early performances by Taiwan's underground theater introduced politically volatile themes such as Marxism. It has since evolved from political protest into a more fluid exploration of culture and mores. These days "we've left behind the yelling and the complaints," says Lee. "We're in a marathon of real dramatic exploration." Even the government now supports some forms of experimental drama, providing funds to half the groups. But the holdouts refuse to rely on official money for fear they will lose their radical edge. Taiwan's richest group, U Theater, gets about $74,000 a year from the government's Cultural Affairs Commission. The reason, says group founder Liu Ching-ming, is "we don't do anything political." U Theater performs in a hillside "camp" that looks more like a kung-fu movie set than a stage. The government funded a three-month trip to India, where U's members learned meditation techniques and trance-like movements. They have become so adept at their slow-motion routines that a dog once wandered onstage during a performance and promptly fell asleep in front of the audience. Yet critics rate U Theater's work banal compared with those of more indigent troupes. =46ar from somnolent is Mary, Marianne, a two-woman show put on recently by Critical Poining look at "what two women can do together," and its action ran the gamut from playfulness and eroticism to violence. The play's lesbian themes and surrealistic "singing language" held the interest of its audience. That only seemed to confirm one reality: to retain their bite, Taiwan's alternative theater works best in coffeehouses and on moldering stages rather than in the limelight.