Metro> Expats
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Metro> Expats
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Amazing Grace takes on city
By Chitralekha Basu (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-10-20 13:05
While each successive play - I Heart Shakespeare (taking the cue from kitsch T-shirt messages), Dirty Dancing, One Night in Beijing, The Orphans, Short Attention Span Theatre, Dummies: the Musical - has seen the company polishing its act, and getting more skilled actors on board, raising the money to mount a production remains a perennial problem. "Anna is a force of nature in Beijing's theater scene," said fellow expat thespian Ian Reed. "She acts, produces, directs, sings, dances, gives workshops, and pays for the production costs from her own pocket." "I have got good graces with Penghao theater," said Grace, referring to the venue they use. She has, only recently, agreed to sell ad space for Wit. Ian Reed, who gives acting workshops to a group of Chinese and expat performers at Club Obiwan every Sunday, is looking at putting together a cast of seasoned actors to act in Shakespeare Reveries. He has already directed the improvisational collage based on texts of Shakespeare at the New York Fringe Festival. In Beijing he will be working with a brand new set of multicultural actors, who would, with hope, be able to open up unimaginable facets of the Shakespearean rhetoric by rearranging the sequence, borrowing across plays and playing across genders. "The actors can embody any character from any Shakespeare play - unfettered by gender, age or type - at any time," said Reed. "They might move from comedy to tragedy to history and back again, often in surprising and unexpected ways." Reed has been a regular on the New York classical theater scene for about 14 years. Having honed his skills at the Shakespeare Workout at Michael Howard Studios, and the Actors' Movement Studio, he lived quietly in Beijing as an English teacher for about three years. Auditioning for the BITE production The Orphans early this year changed things.
 He landed one of the three parts and met fellow actors Nick Ma and Kris Chung. "I was completely blown away by Kris' talent, wondering how I would match up to him," said Reed. He became a BITE regular, playing fairy king Oberon in the next production A Midsummer Night's Dream, and giving workshops to aspiring actors. The ball has started rolling. Reed's one-man show, Wind in the Willows, in which he plays 12 different characters, goes on stage in December. Very recently he was assigned a role in a French film. TV work is pouring in too. To Grace and Reed's utter delight, the percentage of Chinese in the audience and workshops is growing. To relate better to the culture they live and work in, in A Midsummer Night's Dream Puck spoke his lines in Chinese, taking orders from an English-speaking Oberon. "The play is hinged on misunderstandings between the two and in that respect going back and forth between two languages worked beautifully," said Reed.
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