The Village is the performance of an original fable, and fables are a curious thing. Fables play with stereotypes and archetypes to tell the story of how humans live. Fables, more than many other types of story, utilize symbols to indicate the complex undercurrents of their seemingly simple structure. They are often stories told easily to children by adults who interpret them through a lens of irony and moralism.
When presented with a fable, I immediately look to the symbols that appear. In “Little Red Riding Hood” we have a young woman covered in red (the color of blood) going into the woods (the world away from home) and encountering a dangerous wolf who lies to her (“wolf” is often used to describe sexually devious men). The story changes in the light of its symbols. So after receiving a very nice program, I entered into the theatre space of The Village, where each audience member had to choose an English name for herself or himself and sit in the forest listening to mellow English-language electronic folk music while waiting for the play to begin. I felt immediately immersed in the symbols of this new world. The characters all wore western-style clothing, ate bagels for food, and spoke in the vernacular of Christian religion, with their “let us pray” “God (上帝 shangdi) help us”. As the symbols piled on, I found myself questioning more and more what this play, is aiming to teach. By the end of the play, I decided that I could make one of two conclusions: either the creators of this play made a fable without thinking too deeply about its symbolism, at which I wonder why they wrote the fable at all, or that they were very aware of the symbols and were making a strong critique of a (western) culture that doesn’t seem to have a strong connection to the actors, audience or community it’s being performed for. I tend to think the former conclusion is the one that applies here.
There’s a saying about how you can tell if a restaurant’s food is good: the less a restaurant cares about its décor, the better the food. Unfortunately, judging from the posters, program and visual marketing of this play, the décor is beautiful.
其它意見：Spend more time thinking about how this story applies to your audience. Create visual symbols that communicate to your audience in their language.
Fables are wonderful in their flexibility, but they also require a lot of applied dramaturgy and analysis to make them effective for the time and location of the place they are being presented.
演出場地：Elsewhere 那裏