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marlynnofmany · 1 year

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Irrational Attachment

I directed the delivery guy to put the last high-tech crate next to the others in our very full cargo bay, and I breathed a quiet sigh of relief. This was a big order. I noted the final count with a good old-fashioned Earth pencil.

The delivery guy, a fellow human much beefier than I was, smirked at the pencil and clipboard. “Really living in the space age, there,” he said. “Don’t you guys have tablets and scanners?”

“Oh sure,” I replied. “But one has a cracked screen and the other's got a faulty battery. You know how it is.”

His response was eclipsed by the arrival of the sparkly purple conglomeration of limbs that was my coworker Zhee. I was used to bug aliens by now, but I was amused to see the brawny human edge back a step.

Zhee didn’t notice. “What is ‘pack bonding’?” he demanded, clicking to a stop and looking at the two of us expectantly. “They were telling jokes that made little sense.” He waved a pincher arm over his shoulder. “Then it occurred to me that I have a pair of qualified humans here I can ask. Why do people joke about humans caring too much?”

The delivery guy straightened up, all bluster. “Oh, it’s a bunch of radiator wash, really. Lots of species are social. Really, we wouldn’t all have space ships out here if everybody couldn’t cooperate!”

“Well, sure,” I said. “But there’s a difference between cooperating and getting attached. Didn’t you have a teddy bear as a kid?”

“Yeah, as a kid,” he scoffed. “We’re talking about grownups here.”

“Grownups do it too,” I told him, barreling on as he started to object. “We give names and personalities to ships and cars and space probes. We put googly eyes on machinery, and keep pet rocks. We build people out of snow, lending them our own clothes, and we’re sad when they melt away. We have ancient history of granting a bear military rank, and recent history of doing the same to a cleaning droid. We care about things.”

He was still shaking his head and looking stubborn, so I pulled the pencil from my pocket. I held it in front of his face with an intense stare.

“I can tell you that this pencil’s name is Steven,” I said. “Then I can do this—” I snapped it in half. “—And I can watch a little bit of you die inside.”

His expression was that of a person shaken to his core. “What the f— Why would you do that??”

I looked down at the broken pencil. “You can’t tell me humans don’t care.”

Zhee clicked a pincher. “But it’s just a pencil.”

“It was,” I said. “Now it’s Steven.” I pulled a roll of tape from a different pocket. “And now I have to nurse him back to health and apologize.”

~~~

The ongoing backstory of the main character in this book. No pencils were (permanently) harmed in the creation of today's story.

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unwriter-sc · 6 years

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Homelife

One thing I do as I hide from my mother in my room like a small child is reflect on the fact that my mother has what one might call a unique talent, a talent I'm not entirely sure that anyone else on this earth shares. It is the talent of somehow alienating literally everyone in her family in a single short rant and to make everyone look like lazy pond scum depite the fact that some would gladly take the burdens off her back or if they forget one minor thing.

I'm giving you a modern example: my mother just complained about having to pack the entire family's bags (understandable) when I volunteered to do my own bags, she basically told me to not do so and claimed that I was putting more work on her (less than understandable). But despite her talent for alienating everyone in the room with a single sentence, she carries two habits that tend to make a problem worse, one is that she excels at making sure that anyone who she hasn't offended in a room, is offended by the time she leaves (this is because she will then make more rants about how useless we are and how we don't know real work) and her other talent is to be able to ignore select facts to make herself seem superior.

I'm going to make this clear, she's not abusive, she just has a habit of emotionally manipulating each one of her sons and lowering their self-esteem and then getting angry at us when we act anti-social anginst her.

It should also be mentioned that one episode, at about Easter time, she managed to trigger my depression to flair up again (now when my depression flairs up like that, I get rather angry and tend to lash out at things, typically inanimate objects) she managed to call me 'useless' which is basically my biggest fear, a fear of being useless. Such an episode was not helped by the facct that when it began (it allways begins with me crying and verbally berating myself) she poked her head into my room and said something that I can't quite remember but it was something that certainly didn't help with my mental state and actually managed to get me to the whole 'angry lashing out' part of my depression episode sooner. So that was something.

I have to be greatful for her, she does provide opportunities and I don't like talking about my homelife is it is rather boring and I don't want to seem spoilt and complain that I don't have the perfect life (as if such a thing could exist)

#depression #homelife #mental health #mentally ill #family #true story #true #storytime #story

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londontheatre · 7 years

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Foreign Goods Last Forever 2 – Photo by Mariana Feijó

A lot has happened in the world at large since the first time Foreign Goods Last Forever played a packed out Theatre503, so there was plenty of material for the writers and directors to draw from. Certain people who appear obsessed with the Trump Administration and the United Kingdom’s proposed exit from the European Union will, no doubt, will want to express annoyance that this latest batch of short plays doesn’t place its sole concentration on those particular topics. More fool them, to misquote Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Variety is the spice of life, after all.

Dreams of England by Amal Chatterjee sees a schoolgirl (Shuang Teng) ask her father (Brian Law) a barrage of questions about England. The girl and her family live in southeast Asia; the only concrete giveaway clue to the play’s setting is her astonishment that bamboo is not grown in England. It’s a genuine attempt to comprehend the concept of border controls. The analogy of the schoolgirl’s grandfather’s compound is used as an analogy; not just anyone can enter, as they must ask permission.

But the relentless questioning began to get rather weary, particularly as it became clear that the same conversation, with the same questions in the same order, was to take place with the schoolgirl’s mother (Eugenia Low). At least Mother expressed considerable frustration. This is the sort of exercise usually reserved for drama school classrooms, where the same dialogue is repeated with different people so as to gain different perspectives when the same words are said with even slightly varied inflections and tones of voice. For the most part, it worked here, in front of a paying public. That is highly commendable.

I Live in a Vertical Village by Lucy Sheen was a highly descriptive, if pithy, play, emotionally strong whilst managing to be both simultaneously straightforward and complex. On one level, a woman with “horizontal eyes” (Julie Cheung-Inhin), is merely talking about her observations of daily life as she stands, “watching the world through double glazing”. But the descriptions provided are far from the borderline utopian pleasantness in Louis Armstrong’s ‘What A Wonderful World’; this world, the real world, is brutal and unforgiving.

The Stone / No One Disaster Is Total by Amber Hsu includes an intriguing concept of stage directions forming part of the script itself, though there’s one that’s repeated so often (“A shutter clicks. Lights flash. Pause.”) that any atmosphere, photographic or otherwise, it may have generated in the first few iterations had completely disappeared by the end of the play. Windson Liong, Yung Nguyen, Eugenia Low and Velda Hassan display subtle humour in their reactions to unflattering (or otherwise merely implausible) descriptions of miscellaneous characters they must play between them. I couldn’t quite fully comprehend why so much power was ascribed to an inanimate object – the said stone of the play’s title. It’s quite a physical play, and rather absurdist at times as well.

Confessions by Cathy Lam had the audience in stitches. There’s usually one play in compilation evenings of this nature that brings the house down, and this was the one. Charlotte Chiew plays a young Asian lady who likes to date older, rich white men. She gets some stick from her peers for doing so, but in her view, the benefits considerably outweigh the drawbacks. She doesn’t like her own culture, whatever ‘her own culture’ is, preferring Western lifestyles and behaviours. Not much is left to the imagination when she describes herself as a “woman who feasts on Western sausage”, which implies exactly what it suggests it implies. Her white lovers come in for some lampooning too, however, only adding to the hilarity.

The Dressing Loom by Julie Cheung-Inhin stars the writer as the token non-white performer in a pantomime cast. If political correctness was thrown to the wind in the previous play, this one builds on that foundation, leaving even this unassuming south-of- the-river London audience openly gasping.

Foreign Goods Last Forever 2 – Photo by Mariana Feijó

Another actress, played by Kate Llewellyn, secures the part of Christmas Eve in a regional production of the Broadway musical Avenue Q, so she tries to perfect her Chinese accent. Of course, Eve is a Japanese character (and so the joke is really on the white actress). The supporting roles in this play are performed with aplomb by Danny Steele and Chris Keyna. On a more serious note, it would not surprise me if comments expressed regarding a production at the start of 2017 at The Print Room in Notting Hill were verbatim. To summarise, In The Depths of Dead Love was at the centre of a ‘yellowface’ controversy, casting white actors as characters with Asian names in a play set in ancient China. It seems that there are still some very out of date and out of touch viewpoints in the entertainment industry that continue to be upheld by too many people with influence.

Suzie Wong: Fitting in and F*cking Up by Kathryn Golding is heavy with descriptions of childhood. The writer stars in her own monologue, which is extremely up to date, including details of a recent news story about a United Airlines passenger who fell victim to an overbooking problem. You will recall that he was assaulted and beaten before being physically forced off a scheduled flight he had legitimately purchased a ticket for. The other stand-out examples came from the writings of Confucius, dismissed as “lamented but impotent”. A call to arms asserts that East Asians should take their cue from Martin Luther King, Jr and Nelson Mandela: “Our silence is our consent. We’re not gonna take it anymore.” Much food for thought there.

Your Only Right is to Obey by Jingan Young sees Chloe Ewert and Michael Phong Le immediately trade insults and putdowns as though their characters were still in a relationship. I had a little difficulty fully interpreting the background story: as I understand it, an auction was going on. The lot was a person who was to be sold to the highest bidder. Quite what the person was to be expected to do as the property of someone else, and why certain people were to be paid for in this way in the first place, I can only assume is clearer in a longer version of the play. What is clear is that the pair, amongst others, are “selling crumbling perceptions of British culture”, and the play seemed to me a consideration of whether it is right to continue to do what is morally dubious even if there is still a demand for it, whatever ‘it’ may be.

Jamaica Boy by Stephen Hoo sees a gardener (Waylon Ma) in conversation with a friend played by Gilbert Kyem Jnr. The latter character gives us slightly stereotyped Multicultural London English (MLE), (the playwright’s fault, not the performer’s) which draws criticism from the gardener for use of double-negatives and other grammatical constructs that differ from BBC English. Forms of speech are not, however, the salient point. I liked, insofar as I could ‘like’ such a thing, the revelatory example given about how black people need not have stolen anything to be on the receiving end of a theft conviction, simply because it has been assumed by others that they would be the sort of person to commit such a crime. There are parts of London society that remain remarkably behind the times.

Foreign Goods Last Forever 2 – Photo by Mariana Feijó

Trying to Find Chinatown by David Henry Hwang is, I was pleased to later discover, only the title play in a larger collection of works. Benjamin (Matthew Houston) meets Ronnie (Max Percy). The latter is an Asian street musician. The former, despite a Caucasian appearance, claims an Asian heritage, by way of adoption. Ronnie jumps to conclusions and launches into a tirade after Benjamin asked for a location of an address which happens to be in New York City’s Chinatown. But Benjamin wants to go there to see the house his late father grew up in. The play strongly and cleverly asserts that Asians can wrongly judge books by covers as much as Caucasians, and there’s something refreshing about this country hillbilly with a university education putting forward articulate and intelligent viewpoints.

Put simply, I was impressed. This wasn’t a case of establishment bashing and whining about white privilege. It’s difficult to argue against the general premise that people, whatever their background, need to make their voices heard. Martin Niemöller had it right in his ‘First they came…’ poem. Far from navel-gazing, this is theatre as its most thoughtful and outward-looking. Perhaps inevitably, some of the short plays will resonate with different people in the audience more than others. But as a whole, this was a remarkably inspiring evening.

Review by Chris Comaweng

After a sell out show at Theatre503 in 2016, Foreign Goods returns with Visions of England, featuring fully-formed short plays by Chinese and South East Asian playwrights Amal Chatterjee, Kathryn Golding, Stephen Hoo, Amber Hsu, Julie Cheung-Inhin, Cathy Lam, and Jingan Young. The night will include the UK premiere of Trying to Find Chinatown by Tony award-winner David Henry Hwang (Chinglish, M. Butterfly).

Please note, the performance schedule will be the same on both nights.

Tuesday’s performances will be followed by a panel discussion on ‘Englishness’ and visibility of East Asian/Chinese artists in the UK. Speakers include Lucy Sheen, Naomi Sumner, Amanda Rogers and Helena Zhang; hosted by Theatre503 Producer Jessica Campbell.

Founded in January of 2013 by Hong Kong born, award-winning dramatist Jingan Young, POKFULAM RD PRODUCTIONS 薄扶林道 is a non-profit London-based theatre company dedicated to pioneering new writing.

Praise for Foreign Goods (2016) at Theatre503

‘There was something for everyone in this eclectic mix of new plays from female playwrights… great acting… an intriguing event.’ ★★★★ LondonTheatre1

‘Dreams of England’ by Amal Chatterjee Directed by Mingyu Lin Cast Shuang Teng, Eugenia Low, Brian Law

‘Confessions’ by Cathy Lam Directed by Beth Kapila Cast Charlotte Chiew

‘The Stone / No One Disaster is Total‘ by Amber Hsu Directed by Mingyu Lin Cast Windson Liong, Yung Nguyen Eugenia Low, Velda Hassan

‘The Dressing Loom’ by Julie Cheung-Inhin Directed by Alice Kornitzer Cast Julie Cheung-Inhin, Danny Steele Chris Keyna, Kate Llewellyn

‘Your Only Right is to Obey’ by Jingan Young Directed by Max Lindsay Cast Chloe Ewert, Michael Phong Le

‘Suzie Wong: Fitting in and Fucking up’ by Kathryn Golding Directed by Grace Joseph Cast Kathryn Golding

‘Jamaica Boy’ by Stephen Hoo Directed by Mingyu Lin Cast Gilbert Kyem Jnr, Waylon Ma

‘I live in a Vertical Village’ by Lucy Sheen Directed by Alice Kornitzer Cast Julie Cheung-Inhin

‘Trying to Find Chinatown’ (UK Premiere) by David Henry Hwang Directed by Mingyu Lin Cast Max Percy, Matthew Houston

Theatre503 and Pokfulam Rd Productions present Foreign Goods Last Forever 2: Visions Of England Monday 24th and Tuesday 25th April, 7.45pm

http://ift.tt/2oH08Vy LondonTheatre1.com

#IFTTT #LondonTheatre1.com

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