- Date 2008.11.20
- Venue Taipei Crown Arts Center
Listen to Me, Please.
Shakespeare's Wild Sisters Group
Comments on the Finalist
Rhyming four-character sayings and clichéd pattern sentences has turned the speech that originally structured human relationships into a dead language. Cutout paper figures on the stage act out a passionate soap opera of destruction. The metaphor of Dollhouse is no longer sufficient to reflect the condition of the recent hysteria of Taiwanese life. Here, the writer has used the world of toys and games to construct a flattened out Taipei-style life of the stage, which poignantly reveals the falseness of the world of appearances and the unredeemable loneliness of real life. Here, "people" don't "speak words," instead "words speak people." It's for this reason that "Listen to Me Please" is able to echo the pitiful cries of people who have nothing to say. Committee member: Yu-Pin LIN
Artwork Introduction
Shakespeare's Wild Sisters Group's Listen To Me, Please! debuted at the Taipei Crown Arts Center on December 20, 2008. The play exploited various theatrical elements to deconstruct the idea about love, which was further extended into the discussion about life. Using a typical soap-opera plot, the rhyming sappy dialogues ironically highlighted the corniness of love.
Even though the actors wore paper-doll costumes covering their fronts, the huge backdrop mirror exposed their unclothed backsides. A play within the play, here the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet, emphasized the artificialness of the theater and speech, and of the disguises used in communication and courtship.
Listen to Me, Please! was first performed at the 8th Crown Art Festival, 2002. At the end of 2008, director Chia-Ming WANG rewrote the original script to extend the original 40-minute-long script to an elaborate 70-minute-long play Listen to Me, Please!–the Luxury Version. The play is currently planned to have a tour in Beijing on June, 2009.
Listen to Me, Please! has evolved into four versions as various combinations of performers have accumulated a rich, complete, and mature theatrical language. It has become part of the repertoire of SWSG as it is entertaining, educational, and evocative, and could be served as an introduction to experimental theaters.
About the Artist
Shakespeare's Wild Sisters Group (SWSG), established in 1995, is named after Virginia Woolf's novel A Room of One's Own. SWSG takes inspiration from all the arts to create original theatrical works. With vigorous productivity, every year SWSG stages two or more new productions since its genesis and has participated in numerous theater festivals in Taiwan and overseas for years.
Chief creative artist Ying-Chuan WEI incorporates modern literature, especially from the legacy of female artists and writers; in 2003, her Emily Dickinson was staged in Hong Kong. In addition, director Chia-Ming WANG's 2002 production Zodiac II was highly recognized and nominated for a Taishin Arts Awards.
