Successful drama production rests on its ability to induce an audience’s “willing suspension of disbelief.” In this manner, Taiwan’s first and best-known professional theater troupe has brought time-honored international classics to the public--and in the process has engaged local audiences in a critical dialogue with some uniquely local issues.
Just over ten years ago, in 1988, a group of talented graduates of the School of Drama at the National Institute of the Arts in Taipei County established a landmark: the opening of Taiwan’s first professional theater group, the Godot Theatre Com pany. Taking its name from the 1952 absurdist play, Waiting for Godot, by Irish novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett, the group set as its goal the creation of a place where Taiwan’s best artists--actors, directors, musicians, dancers, visual artists, songwriters, choreographers and costumers--could pool their talents to produce an international Chinese drama troupe of the first rank. Founding visionaries included James Chi-ming Liang and Berson Wang. Lacking any professional precedents at the local level, the troupe spent its first few years learning and exploring, testing the medium’s possibilities within the context of the early years of the ROC’s period of democratization. Liang went to New York to work, studied the art of directing with Circle Repertory Theatre for one year in 1993, and returned to Taiwan with an even broader vision. Having viewed over one hundred American dance musicals, he realized the untapped potential of combining Western and Eastern theater, music, dance, and graphic arts in highly effective ways in Taiwan.
Liang explains that, while in the States, he was deeply influenced by productions of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music and South Pacific. And the influence is obvious, as the deep community spirit of these classic American musicals is also present in the Godot Theatre’s productions. If one accepts the premise that a major goal of theater is to create a medium of communication among the dramatists, audience and community concerning topics most relevant to people’s lives, then Godot Theatre is highly successful indeed.
In its current, 1999 configuration, Godot Theatre is made up of three parts, all under the same administrative auspices. The original Godot Theatre mascot is a king pheasant that lives only in Taiwan. The company’s mascot wears a theater mask symbolizing acting, and has graceful steps and a tail, which represent dance and costuming. Liang explains, however, that the pheasant’s feet are both placed firmly on the ground, signifying the company’s stability and seriousness as a theater troupe destined to make a sustained contribution to Taiwan’s art scene. The second part of the Godot enterprise, known as the Growing Theatre Company, cultivates and welcomes new talent. Its mascot is also a king pheasant, identifying it with the original Godot company, except that this pheasant sits atop a weather vane. Underneath it point arrows in various directions, representing Godot’s founding idea that theater styles and ideas will come from a host of different directions. The third part of the Godot group, known as the Golden Child Theatre Company, is symbolized in the logo of the king pheasant picking grain. It represents Taiwan’s youngest theater audiences. Each of the three companies has actors assigned primarily to its own group, but often actors from one group will join another for a performance. Flexibility--in acting, in the choice of scripts, in musical styles, and in appeals to the art of different cultures, all of which speak to educated audiences in Taiwan--is one of the strengths of this homegrown, professional theater company.
Another of Godot Theatre’s strengths lies in the founding director’s artistic synthesis of theater forms from Taiwan and other Asian nations with those of the West--and, even more impressively, international visual art, dance, theater and music. With this complex mix of arts and cultures, Godot Theatre produces plays and musicals that are, like Taiwan itself, not so easily categorized in terms of source influence. Acclaimed musicians from Taiwan and Japan such as Chang Yu-shen and Koji Sakurai have cooperated in Godot’s productions, creating a strong, youthful synergy. Indeed, cultural ground was broken in 1989 when one of Godot’s productions included dialogue in both Mandarin and Taiwanese--a practice that had been forbid den during the ROC’s authoritarian period.
The fusing of Asian and Western art forms can be seen most obviously in the company’s repertoire. Among the Godot Theatre’s twenty-two productions are such Western classics as Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story, Sam Shepherd’s Fool for Love , Edmond Rostand’s nineteenth-century Cyrano de Bergerac , and Marsha Norman’s ’night, Mother. Godot’s Chinese produc tions include the martial-arts play Chyau Fong, the End of Destiny ; Taipei Animal Men; Taiwan As the First One ; and Marriage through Lives. Other productions mingle Eastern and Western ideas and plots even more closely, such as Little Town of Tanshui, a Taiwanese take on Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. The company’s productions are impressive for the fact that they are not simply Taiwan “imitations” of Western plays (a criticism one sometimes hears of other local theater productions, and of the local arts in general), but rather original works of art that combine Western and Asian ideas in the theater, to entertain and challenge modern audiences in Taiwan.
Godot Theatre’s most successful productions to date are, arguably, its four variations of an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. The first production, staged in March 1994, was titled The New Taming of the Shrew. The production was set in Miro City, named for Joan Miro, the Spanish painter whose birthday centenary was celebrated by a giant exhibition in New York the year Liang studied there. Set design, lighting and costumes in this first of Godot’s adaptation of Shakespeare reflect Miro’s influence. In the set design of the second, third and fourth productions, however, though Miro City keeps its name, and though the set designs remain extremely colorful and abstract, it is obvious that the imagined theatrical world is modern Taipei. All of Godot Theatre’s The Taming of the Shrew productions (the last three being titled Kiss Me Nana ) are attempts to provoke the thinking, and to open a dialogue among young, educated audiences in Taiwan on the nature of male and female relationships, the influence of culture on those relationships, the role of marriage in the lives of individuals, and the degree of flexibility audience members have in constructing their own lives. Godot’s targeted audiences for these produc tions are those between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five, the ages in which Taiwanese young people are typically faced with the decision--if not the obligation--to marry.
According to James Liang, the company chose to adapt Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew because of the simplicity of its plot, and because the questions the play raises are quite pertinent to audiences in Taiwan. Interestingly, although Liang knows the Cole Porter musical Kiss Me Kate, and Franco Zefferelli’s film adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew (with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton), his production shows little influence from either. The shrewishness of his Kate, known as Hao Li-na, is uniquely Taiwanese. The Godot production poses the question of why Kate is so tough and individualistic in other words, so unlike the conventional stereotype of the traditional, subservient young Taiwanese woman.
According to Liang, Western representations of the character of Kate--for example, Elizabeth Taylor’s version in the Zefferelli film--makes no sense to Taiwanese audiences living in an Asian society. Hao Li-na, on the other hand, does. She is, in many ways, a role model for the modern Taiwanese young woman. While the play mocks many other character types (such as the greedy father, the outwardly pious but inwardly sneaky younger sister, the “dragon man” suitor looking for a rich wife), it sympathizes with the central young female character, Li-na, who attempts to protect her own identity and create a space for herself in her family and in her society. Though she seems brash and is sometimes downright crude, she honors her father and tries to protect her younger sister from the pawing suitors who pursue her for her father’s wealth.
The true beauty of the Godot Theatre’s four adaptations of The Taming of the Shrew certainly does not derive from the fact that they find their source in “Shakespeare” as an historical construct; rather, it is in the company’s use of a “Shakespear ean” plot to create a new art--one that fuses the classical and the modern, and the East and the West, in ways that fascinate at the same time they entertain modern, young audiences in Taiwan. The choreography of Yuri Ng, the artistic set design of Sammeul Wang, and the costuming of Tsai Yu-fen, as well as the popular music of the late Taiwanese artist Chang Yu-shen and Japanese artist Koji Sakurai, all contribute to the success of the productions--as do the performances of the stellar cast.
Godot’s Shrew productions humorously satirize social assumptions and stereotypes common in contemporary Taiwan, with which the audience members are quite familiar. For example, the old father of the two sisters, Kate and Bianca, dresses in a mandarin’s coat and tails and has the clear goal of finding wealthy husbands for his young daughters. All the old man cares about is the “bottom line” in the exchange. He frequently pulls out his large pocket calculator, which he keeps attached to a long chain, and tabulates monetary figures when discussing suitors’ bids for young Hao Li-ssu (Shakespeare’s Bianca). In another scene, an old Taiwanese song reflects the local thinking that women expect to be married by age thirty--a kind of reassurance to Pan Ta-lung (Shakespeare’s Petruchio, here transformed into Hao Li-na’s “dragon man” suitor) that he will prevail in winning Li-na’s hand.
Li-na’s character is perhaps the most specifically Taiwanese. Unlike the Kates of most Western productions of Shrew, she is portrayed as aging and less attractive than her younger sister. Her “shrewishness” lies perhaps less in her temper than in her reduced marriageability--marriage and childbearing being cornerstones of the Confucian belief that each generation is responsible to the previous one. A temper she has, yet she manages to prove herself to be much more filially pious than the seemingly good sister, Hao Li-ssu. Kiss Me Nana parallels Shakespeare’s plot, but the characters and many of the situations are recontextualized into the society of contemporary Taiwan.
Although the Godot Theatre’s adaptation of Shakespearean plots, themes and characters to audiences in Taiwan may seem to some the most memorable aspect of the company’s work, the most powerful thing about the troupe’s art is its fusion of the technical aspects of Western and Asian theater. In the case of Kiss Me Nana, in addition to Western dance styles, music and acting, the production incorporates acrobatic tumblers from Chinese opera. With the split of Pan Ta-lung’s servants into three androgynous tumbling characters, the riotousness that is so much a part of the spirit of Shakespeare’s comedies be comes tripled as well. In addition, the plays employ characters who cross-dress--a feature of both Shakespearean art and Chinese opera. Though Li-na and Li-ssu might at first seem to female audiences their only two options for role models, in the margins stands Kou-tzu (Shakespeare’s Tranio), a male character played skillfully by an actress in drag. With her true gender only barely concealed, she dances around the stage plotting and controlling the situation for her lovesick master (Lucentio in Shakespeare’s original play). Once again, the most powerful quality of the Godot Theatre is its fusing of forms. In the case of Kiss Me Nana, this fusion also manifests itself in the blurring of gender identities, giving the audience free imaginary reign to explore possibilities that simply cannot be contained in the main plot. In this, their most successful production to date, the Godot Theatre Company amazingly takes one of the most beloved Western plots and molds it into something that makes sense and speaks to young local audiences. It creates a kind of community dialogue in which audience members can take part.
The Godot Theatre Company’s goals for the future include owning its own theater building. Though the state-owned venues currently being used are large, elaborate, and able to hold huge audiences, they are difficult from a practical stand point, lacking flexibility when it comes to adapting the theaters to the special requirements of certain productions. A theater building of its own would also give the company the potential to work all year round, with no need to make arrangements with the national theater buildings’ proprietors--or to become entangled in the cumbersome ideological disagreements that can attend projects requiring cooperation between the public and private sectors.
As another important goal, Godot plans a foray into the international theater market. Places under current consideration for tours include Macau, Hong Kong, Canada and the United States. When asked about possible language difficulties, Liang comments that there are sizable Mandarin-speaking populations in Hong Kong and Macau, and that his research into poten tial other audiences shows that there are almost ten million speakers of Mandarin in North America, with over 400,000 Taiwanese people living in Vancouver alone. Needless to say, Godot’s work, which has already generated interest among many Western scholars (including those attending the 1998 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America), will bring interested Shakespearean scholars from many cultural and language backgrounds. In fact, an article on Godot Theatre’s Kiss Me Nana appears in the 1999 volume of the Western annual, The Shakespeare Yearbook.
And what lies in the immediate present and future for Godot Theatre viewers? July 30 through August 22 saw a summer production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream . The music for this production brings together heavy metal guitar and Chinese lute, combining Shakespeare with the classical art of ancient Chinese music and modern rock music--electric guitar riffs whose roots lie in America, England and Africa. Godot Theatre will prove that the highest quality of theater art, the kind that interacts with its audience and creates a communal dialogue, knows no boundaries of time, space or nation. Further into the future, the company plans to stage My Fair Lady , and then more Shakespeare. One of James Liang’s visions is an adaptation of The Tempest, using Taiwanese aboriginal voices and dance as the dominant, or perhaps the only, music. With scholars’ recent understandings of this play being very closely tied to colonialist issues, what could be more fitting? And what could be more appropriate in Taiwan than to bring its diverse peoples together in theatrical space? Godot Theatre provides a place where all can bring their cultures and imaginations together and commune in peace, participating in the ever-maturing discourse of talent and vision that will contribute to a bright future for Taiwan.
Nanette Jaynes is an associate professor of English at Tamkang University. She specializes in Shakespeare and theater criticism.
Copyright (c) 1999 by Nanette Jaynes.