Holding Its Own on the National Stage

In mid-April, just before Palaces premiered in Taipei, a photograph appeared on Our Theatre’s Facebook page, showing the troupe’s artistic director Wang Jhao-cian standing alone on the stage in the National ­Theater. This marked a significant moment for someone who comes from a cultural backwater, and who once thought very little of himself—a moment that cannot be easily under­stood by people from more privileged backgrounds. Wang founded the Chiayi-based Our Theatre with friends when he was 18, and this year the troupe celebrates its 18th anniversary.

Our Theatre invited Godkidlla to design posters for Palaces, capturing a pungent Taiwanese flavor and a grassroots vibe. (courtesy of Our Theatre)

Coming of age

“It’s no accident that the 18-year-old Our Theatre has made it to the national stage. I’ve been quietly making plans for a long time,” says Wang with assurance. He compares Our Theatre to a child dreaming about coming of age—about the day he will be allowed to go for nighttime karaoke and get a driver’s license, about how to celebrate that momentous event. Our Theatre’s Palaces proposal was selected by the National Performing Arts Center for a coproduction scheme. It took the playwright Wu Ming-lun nearly two years to write and refine the play, and the actors spent almost ten months rehearsing it. The production finally saw the light of day in the first half of 2021 and was performed at the National Theater, the National Taichung Theater, and the National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts (Wei­wu­ying). “This is a milestone for Our Theatre, a small but essential one, considering our ambition to gain more influence,” Wang says.   

When Wang was 15, he impulsively joined his school’s drama club. There he discovered his lifelong passion. Looking back on those days, he congratulates himself on having found his vocation so early. We may think that setting up a theatrical troupe in a cultural backwater is a challenging task, but Wang puts his decision down to his fearless nature. Choosing to base his troupe in Chiayi may appear unwise, but it also has its own advantages: Chang has received a great deal of support from senior cultural figures.

Many people who come to Taipei from rural areas will find themselves undergoing a period of transition. While exploring their own identity, they will revamp their wardrobe, adjust their accents, and try not to appear too parochially Taiwanese. Our Theatre went through a similar process. “When we started, we mainly followed estab­lished Western conventions, but we have relinquished some of those in the past three to five years. We have become bolder and more confident in our attempts to break with tradition.” In order to find its own place, Our Theatre began with the issue of language, paying close attention to ordinary, down-to-earth people and moving away from adapting Western texts to focus instead on Taiwan­ese culture and literature. Its recent production Palaces has drawn on elements of Taiwan’s “Five Mysterious Cases”—“The Apparition of Chen Shouniang,” “Adultery at the Shrine to Lü Dongbin,” “The Ghost of Sister Pandanus,” “Zhou Cheng Travels to Taiwan,” and “The Incarcerated Madwoman”—to create ten new stories that have helped the troupe make a significant move towards originality.

Wang Jhao-cian established Our Theatre with friends 18 years ago. Rooted in Chiayi, the troupe embodies their desire to bring art to the public.

New perspectives on old tales

Palaces is inspired by Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog. Spanning the three decades from 1990 to the present, the plot of Palaces assumes epic grandeur. It is set in a mixed-use building, of a type that can be seen in every major city in Taiwan. Damaged during the 1999 Jiji earthquake, the building, now derelict, has degenerated into an evil place shunned by local residents. The stories that happen in it shed light on the dark side of the human mind.

The “Five Mysterious Cases” in Taiwanese folklore are moral tales that yield penetrating insights into human nature and elucidate the principle of karma, according to which our futures hinge on the morality of our present deeds. The playwright Wu Ming-lun raises the question of whether religion is still needed in a world built upon the rule of law. Rather than merely extending the original tales, Wu’s strategies involve deconstructing events and characters, weaving them into ten sections. In doing so, she gives the stories a different structure and a new perspective. 

For example, in the “Five Mysterious Cases,” the victims are invariably women. In folkloric stories like these, women are able to take revenge only if they become ghosts, and female ghosts often serve a moral function, reminding us that evildoers can never escape with impun­ity. But how would these stories unfold if they were set in modern-day Taiwan, where the rule of law is established? In “The Rain of Needles”—an adaptation of “Zhou Cheng Travels to Taiwan”—Wu depicts what happens after Zhou has left his family. In presenting Zhou’s wife as the family’s sole breadwinner and the carer of her elderly parents-in-law and little child, Wu introduces the issue of long-term care while dramatizing the way Zhou’s wife plots her revenge. The shift in perspective grabs the audience’s attention. In Wu’s version of the story, moreover, the child whom Zhou leaves behind shows symptoms of social withdrawal. This is a subtle portrayal of the much-­maligned “Strawberry Generation” in Taiwan—people born from the 1980s onwards who are forced to accept low incomes and find themselves in a perpetual quagmire, having little to look forward to and nothing to fall back on.

The way Wang Jhao-cian directs the production is also innovative. “Actually I’ve adopted two different lines of logic in directing Palaces: Outside In and Palaces: Inside Out.” The former is a narrative that abides by dramatic conventions: it introduces the characters, allows the story to unfurl, and is propelled by a realist plot. By contrast, the latter is “anti-dramatic.” There Wang challenges ­conventions and abandons everything he has learned about directing theatrical performances. He brings song, dance, magic, and models onto the stage and lets the characters engage directly with the audience.   

Our Theatre’s resident playwright, Wu Ming-lun, has borrowed elements from Taiwan’s “Five Mysterious Cases” to create ten new stories, reinterpreting folklore through the perspective of people born in 1980s Taiwan.

Breaking out of the echo chamber

The curtain has fallen. Outside the theater, discussion rages on. People are debating the director’s style and methods online, and there is a controversy over the Taiwanese phrases used in the Taiwanese and English subtitles. Someone even suggests that to use Taiwanese in the performance is to impose linguistic hegemony. For Wang’s part, he is happy to see these queries and discussions. “Didn’t the theater provide a space for debates in Aristotle’s age?” To avoid being trapped in an echo chamber, we need to broaden our horizons by engaging with people who hold different opinions and speak different languages.

Wang has always embraced challenges. In 2017 he collaborated with Japanese theater director Show Ryuzanji on a Taiwanese version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Performed in Romania and Edinburgh, this project brought him into the international spotlight. In collaboration with Hong Kong’s Theatre Space, Wang produced The State & Denki in 2020, a musical that explores the disappearance of native languages in Taiwan and Hong Kong. It has been shortlisted for the 19th Taishin Arts Award. This year’s Palaces is the largest-­scale production that Our Theatre has ever worked on. Although the play has already made it to Taiwan’s national theaters, there’s more to come. “Palaces means that Our Theatre can present itself to more audiences, communicate with more friends, and access resources from a greater variety of fields.”

Palaces is performed by actors from different generations. Their rich experiences both on stage and in the wider world have enabled them to put on this unique production. Pictured here are Chou Chun-peng (left), Chang Chien-yu (standing, in yellow), Chung Pin-chiao (center, in blue), Lin Wen-yin (right), and Yu Pen-chieh (front).

The future

“At this stage I need to learn to do less,” says Wang. Having put his troupe through several major events this year—organizing the Grasstraw Festival in March, parti­cip­ating in Creative Expo Taiwan in April, and performing Palaces from April to May—Wang can now slow down and catch his breath. “Before turning 18, we were bursting with raw energy, wanting to prove that we could achieve many things and craving to be noticed. So we were all over the place, doing this, that, and the other.” Having come of age, Our Theatre now aims for stability. It wants to round off certain projects, such as presenting more new perform­ances of Palaces and continuing to refine it into a canonical masterpiece that speaks for the present generation.

In the past 18 years, Our Theatre has not only put up new performances but also worked systematically to put down roots. The troupe has its own resident playwright and presides over the “Farm of Plays,” a project that seeks to cultivate talented local scriptwriters. “I make these experiments in order to produce a theatrical ecosystem in Taiwan. This system will prove to be an inexhaustible source of energetic new works. To this end, we need practi­tioners who are skilled enough.” Setting its sights on the future, Our Theatre started to focus on training local actors three years ago.

For example, Palaces is said to have enjoyed the most “spectacular and luxurious” production process in the history of Taiwanese theater. The playwright was given plenty of time to carry out field research and bring the play to full fruition. The actors also received ample remuner­ation, so they were able to devote themselves fully to Palaces during the rehearsal period, without having to take on other projects elsewhere.

Ever since its earliest days, Our Theatre has held firm to the idea that art has a social relevance. It has enabled art and culture to percolate down to the daily lives of people in underserved locations, introducing children in remote areas to the wonders of drama. “I’m interested in the public impact of art,” Wang says. “This is not about one man charging ahead toward his goal. It’s about many people coming together to take one step forward”—a group of people joining forces in order to achieve something. “To give whatever energy you may possess without reservation is a very important thing in life,” he observes, throwing light on the reason why Our Theatre always goes to the greatest lengths to bring each of its projects to fruition.

Chuang I-tseng playing the role of a teacher and fortune teller in Palaces.

Incorporating issues such as long-term care, migrant labor, indiscriminate killings, and social withdrawal, Palaces offers much food for thought.

In Palaces: Inside Out, Wang makes use of magic, models, and real-time projection, turning his back on conventional realist drama.