the made in china project
Stone Soup launched its first season, The Made in China Project, with the intention to take a close look at a culture that was completely foreign to most of us. We aimed to find parallels between our lives and the lives of Chinese people, and then to look at the ways that our choices could affect their lives.
We began with the New York premier of Nobel-Laureate Gao Xingjians' The Other Shore, then took a research trip to China to create The Seventh Song.
the other shore
By Gao Xingjian
The Trilogy Theatre
341 W. 44th Street, NYC
August 24-26, 2001
Inspired by his experiences in China during the Cultural Revolution, Gao's play deals with issues of conformity and loneliness. When we began our research, no one could understand it- how could people allow such terrible things to happen? But as we began to talk about ideas of ethics, human interaction and personal responsibility, our heated conversations about politics in China and here at home made us aware of the terrible things that we ourselves allow to happen, from the personal to a global scale.
Featuring: Dondrie Burnham, Sean Linehan, Jared Maguire, Marsha Martinez, Joe Moran, Carlos Morris, Natalie Silverlieb, Adam Stevens and Suzie Syta
the seventh song
an original play
The John Houseman Theatre
450 W. 42nd Street, NYC
April 4-6, 2002
In the fall of 2001, we continued our research of Chinese history, from Mao's death to that day's New York Times. After September 11, we lost our footing. For a moment, human rights in China seemed almost irrelevant. One actress argued that China was even more important now that no one seemed to be paying attention. As the US dealt with grief, politics and proganda, we only felt closer to the issues of social justice we'd been reading about. In January, each actor had chosen the issue he or she wanted to focus on. After company members traveled to China to see first-hand what life was like, actors began to build characters with a story based on our research. We pieced these stories together to create The Seventh Song.
Featuring: Dondrie Burnham, Nadine Friedman, Marissa Goldberg, Marsha Martinez, Joe Moran, Sean Linehan, Suzie Syta, Ben Trawick-Smith
Stone Soup company members in Yangshuo, China
The cast of The Other Shore performs in Washington Square Park
