WAITING FOR GODOT

by Samuel Beckett
Arts Theatre, Chulalongkorn University

TWELFTH NIGHT

THEATER; 'Twelfth Night' At Yale Repertory

By ALVIN KLEIN Published: February 12, 1995, Sunday
New York Times

WHAT is reassuring about the Yale School of Drama's "Twelfth Night" is its palpable sense of ensemble fun in a production where chaos wins over cohesion.
Granted that "What You Will" is the comedy's alternate title and that the director Mark Rucker, in his return to Yale two years after graduating from the directing program, is in a farcically free-for-all state of mind. Still, his is a "Twelfth Night" not "untangled by the whirligig of time." A program note reminds one that "Where there is no illusion, there is no Illyria." In "Twelfth Night" according to Mr. Rucker, there is no illusion. Delusion, perhaps.

In reality, there is no Illyria either. So there is no need for geographical (Adriatic Sea) or for that matter temporal (17th century) fidelity. Anything, indeed, goes.
And has. "Twelfth Night," so called only because it was written for the festive occasion on the sixth of January, has often inspired contemporary musical reworkings, including "Music Is" and "Your Own Thing." Since the play asks the eternal question "What is love?", it is arguably more open to unbounded interpretation than any play in the canon. In Mr. Rucker's view, the play appears to take place outside an Italianate cabana club as though an extra or two, fresh from a Fellini or a Marx Brothers outtake, were wandering through the Borscht Belt, under the influence of a snort of cocaine and a tune by Kurt Weill.
The centerpiece of Ritirong Jiwakanon's setting, which mirrors penthouse-party decadence, is a pool. The pool is for dunking and splashing. Shakespeare's water music is ill served. Disconcerting as it is to observe a duel with swords at a 1960's poolside, it's simply silly to see a Sebastion (Nathan Hinton) and a Viola (Sanaa Lathan) so incongruously unalike, save for skin color, that no one could mistake one for the other. Except, granted, Suzanne Cryer's nymphomaniacally unhinged Olivia. Ensemble or no, Ms. Cryer is working the room. And Sir Toby Belch belches, after the pickled herring. Elvis and Donovan are heard. The mood is, at once, orgiastic and juvenile. The memory is of sunglasses, sun screen, towels, chopsticks, boots, blazers, flasks and bongo drums.

John Bland plays an outlandish Malvolio who makes a stab at duality of characterization. Trevor Anthony (Sir Andrew), Stephen DeRosa (Feste, the clown) and James Hallett (Sir Toby) are resort comics, with Mr. DeRosa being a crooner too. Michael Strickland, doubling as Sebastian and as the captain in some performances, is a funny hippie priest replete with love beads.
How many "Twelfth Night" productions have put the clown's premise "Nothing that is so is so" to a test of such severity? Mr. Rucker's is a long night's irrational, lustful spaced-out romp, with too many side trips to Romper Room.
"Twelfth Night," through Saturday, at the Yale Repertory Theater, corner of York and Chapel Streets in New Haven. 432-1234.

LADY WHITE

Another example of Buddhism repressing female desire appears in the well-known Chinese tale The White Snake. Also made into many Thai films and television dramas, it appeared recently as the stage play Nangphaya Ngu Khao (The White Snake Queen, 1998).7 In its traditional version, the white and green snake sisters transform themselves into humans, and the white snake falls in love with an ordinary mortal. A monk informs the husband that he is not married to a woman but a snake. The couple already has a child and the man does not believe the monk until he gives his wife a special draught that reveals her snake form. With the husband's help, the monk is again able to imprison the snake and free the man from her clutches.

Daraka Wongsiri, one of the few professional playwrights in Thailand, revised the tale to reflect the snake's point of view. Wongsiri has had her play produced both at the professional Bangkok Playhouse, which she cofounded in 1993, and as an experimental dance-drama at the Chulalongkorn University Drama Department, directed by Ritirong Jiwakanon. In Wongsiri's text, freely adapted from Benjamin Chia's novel Madame White Snake, White Snake is a benign creature, and the relationship between the two snake sisters is as important as the one between White Snake and her human husband, the pharmacist Xixian. He courts her and she shows no undue sexual aggression. After she marries him, she uses her knowledge of herbs to cure the villagers. This power casts her in the traditional mold of a witch, but she never uses it against anyone. Unlike Mae Naak, White Snake harms no one and, thus, the monk Fahai's antagonism stems solely from his determination to sever unholy relations between human and nonhuman. When her unmarried sister, Green Snake, pines for their mountain homeland, White Snake promises to return. She intuits that her happy family life is doomed, saying, "We will not be able to spend our lives with them [humans] because we are not accepted for what we are. . . . And I am afraid of them. I am afraid of the hatred they show us. Even a man that we love most, also leaves us with hostility. Have you ever thought what would happen to us if everybody knew the truth?" (Wongsiri 1998: 39).

Fahai's vindictive righteousness in saving the human male from the female snake is far from the compassion of the Buddha. Wongsiri makes him the most unsympathetic character in the play. He instructs Xixian to deceive his wife by telling her that he has been imprisoned in the temple. Green Snake immediately knows it is a trap, but the loving wife takes her baby and goes to see her husband. Thus she is not guilty of any marital misconduct. Quite the contrary, she has in all ways fulfilled the wifely ideal. Her nature, not her behavior, condemns her.

Caught by Fahai's ruse, the snake goddess does not go on the rampage attacking villagers as Mae Naak did, but invokes natural forces, her old powers of rain and thunder, to battle the monk. Fahai subdues her by trapping her in the Golden Pagoda, where she is deprived of her husband, child, and sister. Only after Fahai dies does White Snake break through her prison and return to her sister in the mountains, with the final vision being of the two snakes dancing through the sky. The monk constrained them, but he was not able to destroy them. In Wongsiri's script, "The white snake is more sincere than the humans and ironically, the victorious monk Fahai looks like a villain" (Danutra 1999).
Taking a critical look at Buddhism's patriarchal values, Wongsiri reveals the misogyny behind the monk's destruction of a woman's love for her husband and child when he calls her a "devil." The original tale, by positing the two sisters as snakes, suggests the evil animal nature lurking behind all women's power, while in the new version they show a true affection for one another as well as a transcendent love compared to the self-righteous morality of the monk. When confronted by Buddhist rejection, they return to their pure natural element—thunder and rain. When the script was first performed as an experimental dance-drama in the small theatre at Chulalongkorn, abstract movement was used to create a more suggestive ambience of a mystical world in which humans and snakes could interact. At the end, two enormous snakes that were manipulated like a Chinese lion dance, symbolizing the snakes' return to their natural state, filled the stage.

When The White Snake Queen was restaged as a musical for the Chinese New Year at the Bangkok Playhouse, it was a spectacular production with well-known singers, lavish sets, newly written songs, and a realistic Chinese mise en scène. Despite its six-month run, Wongsiri said in a February 6, 2000 interview that the modern theatre-going public is not all that enamored of romantic tragedies and prefers comedies.

In the stories of both Mae Naak and the White Snake, institutional Buddhism curtails their aspirations and power. The early antagonism between the female animist deities and Buddhism still plays a role in popular mythology. The sangha, the Buddhist clergy, is a rigid hierarchy and has consistently forbidden women an equitable role both in its organization and philosophy: "Under both state and ecclesiastical law, women are prohibited from being ordained as female Theravada monks or bhikkhunies. While they can become nuns (mae chii) such status, in religious terms is clearly in inferior and subordinate to that of monks and does not provide them with either state benefits or social prestige" (Klausner 1997: 68).

One of the first conflicts between the incoming Buddhist religion and the indigenous rice goddess, Mae Khao, reveals a gender struggle for respect as well as the compromise between foreign and native ideologies. Siraporn Nathalang compares several versions of the encounter, but in all of them the goddess presents herself as more powerful than the Buddha, who must finally humble himself to exact grudging acceptance from her:

The rice goddess and the Buddha are put in a confrontational situation. . . . moreover these two characters symbolically represent two systems of beliefs. One is the belief in the rice goddess, which I would say, represents all the indigenous beliefs, and the other is the belief in the Buddha, which represents Buddhism adopted later. What the story recorded is that when the two systems of religious beliefs met, there was conflict. This is symbolically shown by the competition who is greater by demanding the other party to wai, to bow with hands pressed together, or pay respect. Since Buddhism did not recognize the importance of the indigenous beliefs, Buddha did not wai to Mae Khao who indignantly left with the result being drought and starvation. In order to gain back the balance of nature, the Buddha had to beg the rice goddess to come back. Thus the conflict is eventually resolved by Buddhism acknowledging the contribution of the indigenous beliefs.
(Nathalang 2000: 106)

This confrontation underwrites the antagonism of Buddhism toward the older female deities and the assimilation process by which Buddhism either incorporated their powers or forced them underground. These legendary conflicts also reveal institutional Buddhism's distrust of women as if believing that even a good woman cannot keep her demon nature in check. Female animist cults and male-dominated Buddhism coexist today. Their relationship can be seen in the uneasy though accommodating proximity of the golden elaborate Wat Mahabute and the ramshackle but well-attended shrine to Mae Naak behind it. Theatrically both Mae Naak stories and White Snake plays continue to explore this vexed relationship while gradually giving more credence to the female perspective.

Catherine Diamond
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/asian_theatre_journal/v023/23.1diamond.html#plate08

PEER GYNT

THEATER; At Yale, Nude Trolls And Pigs That Fly
By ALVIN KLEIN
Published: April 24, 1994, Sunday
New York Times

YOU may have heard the story about the professor who asked, "How would you produce 'Peer Gynt?' " and the student who answered, "Do it on the radio." Variations of the response have come up in plays ("Educating Rita") and no doubt in theater classes for a century. (Someone once said: "Get the record.")
It's not that Ibsen's phantasmagorical epic, the theatrical equivalent of a dare, has been wanting in productions since its premiere in 1867, even though Edvard Grieg's "Peer Gynt" Suite is more frequently performed. One production in Sweden in the 1950's had 106 adults and 120 children in the cast. A streamlined version at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park (in 1969) starred Stacy Keach, Judy Collins, Olympia Dukakis and Estelle Parsons.

Last year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a staging in Swedish by Ingmar Bergman ran four hours though it too was abridged. And Mark Lamos directed the full five-hour version in two parts to considerable acclaim with Richard Thomas in the title role at Hartford Stage Company in 1989. A 1961 Off Broadway musical, "Meet Peter Grant," was a Peer Gynt knockoff in a Midwestern setting.
Still, it's a fearsome thing, attending to the demands of what Walter Kerr called "a dozen little plays in a dozen different styles, held together only by the fact that a single imagination was coping with them all without too evident signs of indigestion." 'Spiritual Liberation and Catharsis'

Spanning some 60 years, "Peer Gynt" spins an allegory -- dread word -- about what Ibsen called "spiritual liberation and catharsis." Peer Gynt has been variously called a liar, a happy-go-lucky lad, a lusty bumpkin, a no-good bum, a tragic clown, a visionary anti-hero and an extroverted Everyman.

At a wedding he abducts and abandons the bride (Ingrid). He has his way with the virgin Solveig. He falls under the spell of the trolls (who symbolize total self-indulgence). After making millions in America, he loses them in Morocco and wanders in the Sahara, steals the jewels of a dancing girl (Anitra), becomes master of a madhouse in Cairo and returns to Norway, finding salvation through the true love of Solveig.

Undaunted by a tale that scales mountain tops, in the process depicting a sphinx, a shipwreck, a troll kingdom and other extravagances, Jean Randich, a director, decreed "Peer Gynt" her thesis production at the Yale School of Drama. "Why not do something I'll never get a chance to do, something wild, something impossible?" she asked.

Under the title "Gynt" -- perhaps in the hope that the production will prove truly peerless -- Ibsen's classic, Randich style (five acts, three hours, one intermission) is to open Tuesday and run through Saturday at the University Theater (222 York Street, New Haven; 432-1234), which has been radically reconfigured for the occasion. Actors and Audience on a Plane
With capacity reduced to 130, platforms corresponding to stage level have been built atop the theater's 800 seats. The audience -- seated on risers, not chairs -- and the actors are on the same plane. The setting, designed by Ritirong Jiwakanon, extends to the rear wall, encompassing the theater's scene shop as well as the exits. When the door opens, Gynt, now in his late 70's, is presumably to continue his search on the streets of New Haven.

"As written, the play is circular, with Gynt going back to Norway," said Frederic Marguerre, the production's administrative director and a second year drama student. "Jean's vision, which ends in 1994, tries to break that circle."
Mr. Marguerre described the theater's conversion as "an extraordinary luxury." "We call it an economic vacuum because we're not thinking in economic terms, but creatively and academically, for art's sake, which gives us all the freedom outside the realm of finances."

Mr. Marguerre described Ms. Randich's revisionist "Gynt" as "psychological, intense, under the skin, clear and gripping." He continued: "She forces you to rethink. Romance is removed, but the end is full of emotion."
"It's surreal, it's supernatural, Felliniesque and grounded in reality, with 1920's black and white and 1960's Pop art scenes -- and cross-gender casting," the director added. An Anitra Like Divine?
"Anitra is played by a man -- like Divine -- and the trolls are in combat boots, wire masks, Mozart periwigs -- surface Baroque royalty -- but they have nothing on. And huge wire pigs fly and the sphinx drops."
The sound design is by Robert C. Cotnoir. Mr. Marguerre described the music as "loud, psychedelic, funky -- one style is dubbed on top of another -- and somewhat overwhelming." And not a note of Grieg.

In a "Gynt" marketing blitz, Mr. Marguerre has showered New Haven's merchants with "Gynt" posters, "Gynt" T-shirts and helped to circulate the buzz that the show is "not long and boring."
"Peer Gynt" has, of course, invited voluminous critical analysis. Kenneth Tynan called it "a study of the fallacy that is inherent in total dedication to self-fulfillment." Eric Bentley wrote that " 'Peer Gynt,' though not quite a prophecy of other-directedness, is about the danger of self-disrespect, of having no sense of identity, of being a human onion, all layers and no center."

And Mr. Kerr may have paved the way for what Ms. Randich calls a production that "lets everybody go, to shake everything up" when he wrote: "The notion of a perfect production of 'Peer Gynt' may be a contradiction in terms. We must let the play be perverse in order to have something to contend with."
"It's a lot of fun," Ms. Randich said. "We're reaching for a conjunction of the erotic and the spiritual but the story's accessible. And we all know what monsters are. They're inside of us."




Pre-set before the play begins.

Troll scene

Peer Gynt becomes rich

The Pyramid

The madhouse

She is longing for him.

He is back at last.

The sketch of the structure of the set.

MIRACULOUS ADVENTURES OF THE CONCH PRINCE (SUNG THONG)

The adaptation of a classical Thai literature drama "Song Thong"
The legend retold: Art direction
Sponsored by Thailand Research Fund
Bangkok Theatre
2005

SPRING AWAKENING

By Frank Wenekin
at Arts Theatre, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok.
2002

THE RIVER OF KINGS IV

The Visual multimedia Light and Sound show " The River of Kings IV "
Entitled " Righteous King of Fantasy Forest "
A contemporary fantasy musical playInspired by the Jataka and ancient talesCreatively Crafted with multi-special effectsCombined with a contemporary puppet artTo deliver the illusive imagery to you as thesplendid miraculous portray

Upon the far… far away, there was a fantasy forest called Himmabanta where all creatures lived peacefully in harmony by the glittering golden warm light from an enchanted lotus which was the source of warmth and power of life. One day the glowing light got weaker and weaker.
Boded ills spread through the land. All angels and creatures went to the Brahma for inquiry about the reason, thus, he stated " human beings have done more evil deeds than good. Good deed which empowers the light of the enchanted lotus is fading. Now, disaster is creeping into the world and this land ". Brahma suggested finding a righteous man of virtue which would make this light shine again for a thousand years. There were only 7 days by the time of Himmabanta Forest or 700 years in human land to find this great man and prove his virtue, if not the magic light from the lotus would vanish forever. Then the world and this land would be gone.

A couple of birds volunteered themselves to search for this great man. The angels suggested them to sail across the rainbow of time to human world and go find the Sun God to ask for this man. "Who is the real great man on this world and what is the ultimate virtue of this man?" questioned the birds. Therefore, the Sun God led them to the land ruled by a great powerful king.

Disappointedly they viewed nothing but blood shed and death. The birds went on and, then, upon receiving advice from the boat rower to go and seek help in the subterranean world of Naga (the great serpent). Naga took them to find out this prosperous land ruled by the insidious and inequitable King.

Meanwhile, every life in Himmabanta Forest was waiting anxiously as time passed by. The rower led the birds to Santi Nakorn where people lived peacefully underneath the Ten verses of Dharma ruled by King Dhammathep. It was the trihead-elephant celebration at that time.


The birds did not have much time to prove the virtue of this king, thus, they disguised themselves to be the great hawk, preying a pigeon to the ceremonial pavilion where the King resided. The King asked for pigeon's life but the great hawk strongly denied as the pigeon belonged to him.
If he could not feast, then, he could die of starvation. What would the King's decision be? What kind of goodness could save the world and Himmabanta forest? All could be found in " Righteous King of Fantasy Forest - The River of Kings IV" at Rachaworadit Pier, Bangkok from January 31st - February 13th, 2003.
'Giving is the highest Grandeur'

THE RIVER OF KINGS V

The River of Kings performance is a part of the cultural program to promote tourism in Thailand, initiated by Princess Ubolrattana, in conjunction with The Tourism Authority of Thailand.
It is intended to be one of the attractions to Thai people and world tourism.
The show is performed at Ratchaworadit Pier, by the Chao Phraya River, against the background of the graciously beautiful Grand Palace.
We believe that the River of Kings performance will reflect some great cultural achievements, representing the heritage of Thailand to the world.

23 January 2004 - 5 February 2004

Sound and Light Extravaganza

At Rachaworadit Pier

Bangkok

Prince Suriyendha and Dr. Mintra Jandhrataewee-Queen of the Eternity
The white priest
Norrakan
The old king


Over two thousand years back, there was a city place called Eternity City where
the Old King and his son, Prince Suriyendhra, reigned peacefully for a long time.
Untilone day, army of devils invaded the city. Prince Suriyendhra led his troops to
fight back but failed to defend. In the time when all the people were in fear and
desperation, the White Priest suddenly appeared and overcame the devils.

While the people of Eternity City praised to the White Priest, the Old King
and Prince Suriyendhra were having doubt with his appearance.
Later, the Old King passed away leaving the Prince to confront fate alone.
The White Priest took over the throne in a hope of finding the Moon stone,
a sorcery stone that will give him the power to rule the world.

Prince Suriyendhra knew this dreadful plan but could not resist. In the time
of despair, Dr. Mintra, a lady who was full with faith and love , has traveled
through time dimension to the Eternity City and joined the Prince in battling
with the devils and all obstacles. Love had been created between the Prince
and Mintra during the time of happiness and sorrow day were sharing. Mintra
was married to the Prince and named Jandhrataewee - Queen of the Eternity.
She helped the Prince in ruling the city.

The power of faith in love and goodness of the Prince and Jandhrataewee
empowered them to conquer the army of devils and the White Priest. While
destiny of the poor Prince had been made to die in the deadly storm, only
faith in love and goodness of Jandhrataewee and had saved his life.