Taxi Radio
Friday, October 9, 8:00 pm ET
Podcast Release and Listening Party
You can also listen to this episode at either of links below:
© 2020 by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Written by Nophand (Thailand)
Translated from Thai by the playwright
Directed by Aya Ogawa
Culture and Dialect Coached by Nana Dakin
Cast:
Dion Graham as E
Chris McKinney as D
Andrea Morales as C
Kate Rigg as M
Sathya Sridharan as Q
Original compositions by Natalie Layne Baker and Theo Van Dyck (trumpet).
This podcast was recorded under a SAG-AFTRA Collective Bargaining Agreement.
On a stormy night in Bangkok, four beings are stuck in traffic. Accompanied by karaoke hits, Taxi Radio is a dark comedy that conjures the afterlife and calls upon higher powers to critique cycles of corruption. This soulful play highlights the absurdity of navigating one’s own life in the maelstrom of expectations and statuses. GPS, Google, and Facebook won’t help you out of these dead ends.
Nophand is a Thai citizen who migrated to London at the age of nine. After thirteen years in the city of diversity, he returned to Bangkok to pursue a career in acting. Along the way he discovered a passion for theatre, then writing, then directing, and then he caught full-blown “playwrightism” and became a theatre artist. Thirteen years later, with fifteen productions that mainly reflect upon contemporary issues of the human condition, Nophand continues to explore the art of theatre—introducing Bangkok audiences to site-specific, immersive, and single-audience experiences that echo our collective thought.
Nophand will discuss Taxi Radio in the festival’s Translator Panel Discussion and in the Playwright Panel Discussion, both linked below.
Aya Ogawa is a Tokyo-born, Brooklyn-based playwright, director, performer, and translator whose work reflects an international viewpoint and utilizes the stage as a space for exploring cultural identity, displacement, and other facets of the immigrant experience. Cumulatively, all aspects of her artistic practice synthesize her work as an artistic and cultural ambassador, building bridges across cultures to create meaningful exchange amongst artists, theaters and audiences both in the US and in Asia. The plays she created and directed include The Nosebleed (Incoming! Under the Radar), Ludic Proxy (The Play Company), Journey to the Ocean (Foundry Theatre), and oph3lia (HERE). Most recently she directed Haruna Lee’s Obie Award-winning Suicide Forest at The Bushwick Starr and its off-Broadway remount for Ma-Yi Theater. She has translated numerous plays by Toshiki Okada and numerous other contemporary Japanese playwrights into English that have been published by Samuel French among others, and produced in the US and the UK. She is currently a resident playwright at New Dramatists, a Usual Suspect at NYTW, and recipient of the President’s Award in Performing Arts, LMCC. ayaogawa.com