“Thin Lines“

Reviewer: Beverly Yuen
Performance: 31 October 2015

Audience is greeted by a stark white stage after entering the theatre, hinting at a minimalist production. The actors, dressed in all white, play multiple roles in various stories that surround an Asian staple, rice. From there, it springboards into themes of living and dying; separation and reunion; fleetingness and rootedness. White, which is the colour of rice, is the colour of purity and hope. Paradoxically, it is also the colour that can be most easily soiled.

Seed, produced by The Finger Players in association with the Asian Performing Arts Festival and Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, is directed and written by Chong Tze Chien and presented by a group of 7 Japanese performers. It surrounds the stories of Japanese families and their reaction to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.  While most people are looking for ways to escape from the affected areas, a Japanese wife and her dead husband make their way to Fukushima from New York in search of the dead husband’s origins. The communication between the dead and living in the play seems to suggest that the lines between life and death; opportunity and danger; tradition and modernity are thin. This is further represented by the display of red, green and white threads on the bare stage, which are also used to signify telephone line, television screen, rice field and radiation in the play.

The performers handled the philosophy-heavy ideas embedded in their domestic dialogue well. The references to rice and these ideas were supported by their engaging, focused, believable and precise acting. Performance style is a mix of stylised and realist acting. Rice links one who works in the field to his land, roots and tradition. A family tradition, as the play implies, is alike the rice field that is passed down from one generation to the next; and this has to be sustained with right values such as diligence and commitment.

While the play has its surreal and humorous elements which made me laugh and reflect on the existence of being at times, the overly philosophical subtexts that are carried by the characters drained me half way through the play. These philosophical connotations could perhaps be conveyed to the audience better if the surrealist and stylistic elements of the piece are pushed further, beyond the comfort zone of watching a relatively well-made play crossed with essentially, a domestic drama.

“The Seed of Life“

Reviewer: Walter Chan
Performance: 29 October 2015

An intense spiritual experience that rethinks concepts of love and loss.

As I left the theatre after the performance, I was struggling to find a word to encapsulate my feelings towards this piece by The Finger Players. I was disturbed, but not in a bad way. I was anxious for more, but I was satisfied with the length of the play.

And I think that’s the true beauty of SEED – it creates this complex emotion within you, like many different flavours coming together on one’s palate.

SEED was devised during the 2013 Asian Performing Arts Festival in Tokyo under the direction of Chong Tze Chien, and is composed of a series of loosely-linked vignettes set in a Japanese context. An old man dies in a foreign land (New York) and wishes his wife to bring his body back to Japan. A rice-farming family in Japan disintegrates after the death of the mother. A nuclear incident leads a university student to try to convince her mother to leave the house to avoid the fallout.

The soul-searching of the play draws audiences in and reveals an ironic twist to everyday situations. These include: a wife’s misplaced love for her husband by constantly cooking for him ends up inadvertently feeding him to death; a starving couple afraid of food affected by nuclear radiation travel to the area affected by the nuclear fallout and discover that the food there is delicious after all.

SEED is performed in Japanese (with English surtitles), but don’t worry if you don’t understand Japanese – it won’t detract from your enjoyment of the play. Those familiar with Chong’s unique writing style will also recognise elements from his earlier works: the web of narratives, the black humour, and the blurring of boundaries between dead and alive. Together with the influences from Noh theatre and the Japanese culture’s emphasis on interiority, the play forms a delicately-nuanced take on famine and family, consumption and copulation.

The staging setup is simple: cords are strung across the stage in different configurations, and costuming is equally minimal (save for the use of masks). The focus, then, is on the acting, which the ensemble cast pulls off brilliantly. However, I suspect the performance may have benefited from a smaller venue, to experience the intimacy suggested by the play (I also notice that there are many empty seats, on opening night, no less!).

“We need things before we understand why we need them.” This, together with several other aphorisms, are scattered throughout the play, encouraging audiences to reflect on aspects of life that are normally taken for granted.

Rice. Family. The afterlife. Beauty in destruction.

And of course, good theatre.