The Good Person of Sichuan

At LaSalle, working with a student cohort from a diverse array of Eastern and Western cultural backgrounds, I contextualized a production of The Good Person of Sichuan, as an exercise in political theatre-making, adopting the premise that the focus of the political theatre-maker is dual – on the text itself, and on the social and political context in which the production is presented. Accordingly, I devised a series of exercises in which the students were asked to research both the play, and the relevant cultural phenomena and social conditions of their own environment, and to bring their discoveries on both subjects into the rehearsal process. These experiments generated images, music, texts, news articles and other artefacts of contemporary Singapore culture as well as a physical language for character and production style derived from extensive mask-work to expand the students’ physical exploration of character and style and unlock their creative potential. From there we together devised a production that integrated these two strands of research, in such a way as to let cultural context shed light on the play, and the play shed light on the contemporary cultural context.