I Am a Moon

Drum Tower West Theatre

5, 6/5 │ Friday, Saturday │ 19:45
Small Auditorium, Macao Cultural Centre
Tickets: MOP 220

“A story about the moon and the wound, cruel yet tender.”Beijing Youth Daily 

A piano dented by high heels, a bruised apple on a shelf, and a body covered in love bites. What do they have in common with a moon full of craters? An astronaut on a mission to the moon, a salaryman who has lost his admired actress, a female math student who puts on weight during puberty, a rock star who is unlucky in love, a fruit store owner and his wife who met while in their teens... Under the moonlight, each of them is with their own worries. This production reveals in the form of a prose poem the stories of six people, independent yet interconnected.

Written by playwright Zhu Yi, I Am a Moon premiered in New York in 2011. The script was then translated into Chinese and the production has been staged at theatre festivals both at home and abroad. This performance, directed by Ding Yiteng, acclaimed as one of the “leading young theatre directors”, brings the faraway moon to the audience, inviting us to take a closer look at its craters.


Playwright: Zhu Yi
Director: Ding Yiteng
Cast: Ding Yiteng, Kang Tongge, Wang Dingyi, Huang Yizi, Zhang Jiahuai, Liu Shang and Kang Yutian
Composer: Ding Ke
Choreographer: Liu Shang


Duration: Approximately 1 hour and 50 minutes, no interval
Performed in Mandarin, with surtitles in Chinese and English 
Restricted to audiences aged 13 or above

Introductory Text

I Am a Moon is a poetic production in which the journey to the moon is used as a metaphor for the search of the self. Written by US-based Chinese playwright Zhu Yi, this play combines the unique sentiment of solitude expressed in Sinophone literature with American self-deprecating black humour. The plot consists of two parts: a depiction of an isolated astronaut's journey to the moon, and the interconnected stories of five ordinary people on different terms, each of them echoing with the astronaut's states of mind while in space.

The play will be performed by the Drum Tower West Theatre on an ingeniously designed stage. In the centre is a revolving playground, on whose background the astronaut can be seen passing by, sometimes riding a bicycle, other times pushing the moon. The intriguing fairy-tale stage invites the audience into the starry sky to have a glimpse at the characters’ lives from an omniscient perspective.

I Am a Moon is a play full of vitality, glowing with the playwright’s keen observation of life, and the director’s examination of the subtleties in human relationships, and leaves the audience with a more compassionate and poetic view of life.

 

By Becca Cheung
Graduated in Directing from the School of Drama of The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts and has also engaged in physical theatre and dramaturgy.


This article is excerpted and translated from Chinese

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