How do we go to "the other place"?
What is the price?
The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek
adapted from Naomi Wallace's play
Naïve Bookstore,
Aranya Theatre Festival, 2025
The transformation of two teenagers attempting to grasp love, adulthood, and the future in a time dominated by economic depression, violence, and the jail system, anchored around a suicide and an arousal.
One refuses to enter her adulthood, while the other has no control over his life. The two kids entangle in the brutality of existential crisis, the delicacy of solitude, and the marginalization of a generation. This play is a glass of smothering hot water in a town so small that you cannot breathe, and a smacking knife of a train so fast that it cuts the time in half. There's the before and the after, and both replays in front of your eyes. However, in this life with unbearable pain, there is one tiny escape; one moment that belongs to you and you only; it's the beginning and the end.
I was drawn to the beauty of fragility in Wallace's writing, which strongly echoes a shared East Asian coming-of-age experience. The mental proximity to The Trestle encouraged me to bring this work, written in English, to the adapted production in Mainland China, as part of my exploration of bilingual theatres. Since the play is anchored around the characters' physical and mental transformations, I attempted to take the transformation of identities to another level. I took inspiration from Joe Calarco’s Shakespeare’s R&J, and invited the audience to witness threefold transformations of both the space and the actors. The bookstore became the world of The Trestle as the actors took the script off the bookshelves and turned into the characters, and The Trestle world vanishes into "the other space" when the characters experience their first sexual awakening in the end of the play.
Zoe Lai, the dramaturg and sound designer, helped with the editing and translation of the text greatly. Subtitles were made possible with the help of production manager, Ee Ee Huang.
The cast includes Dorothy Guo (Pace Creagan), Brad Brady (Dalton Chance), Savannah Smith (Gin Chance), Cypress Cai (Dray Chance), and James Stutts (Chas Weaver).
Audience reviews
"It reminds me of Edward Yang's Yi Yi and A Bright Summer Day. There is no escape from empathizing with the teenagers and sensing the melancholia in your backbone."
"The moment when the shadows collide and the voices doubled took my breath away. It is incredible how the production transformed the physical locus of me as an audience."