News

2008.0104

Award Winning Author Invites Taiwanese Talents to Help Him Tell the World How Amazing Taiwan Is

By Sabrina Lin Campus Reporter With a long-term click with Taiwan, award winning author Dr. Edward F. EmanuEl returned to the soil and tried to find his favorite Taiwanese talents for his latest music play – Amazing Taiwan, while he is teaching on the campus today and tomorrow. EmanuEl said that he was deeply impressed and moved by Taiwanese people’s tough spirit and loving each other after a major disaster, when he came to Taiwan in 2000, shortly after the 921 Earthquake.  He then began to work on Amazing Taiwan, of which, he would deliver the message and the spirit for the world to know. "I saw it myself that Taiwanese people have recovered from the disaster within the past eight years.  I would love to tell the world that Taiwan is a place of love and hope through this music play,” EmanuEl said. He mentioned that Amazing Taiwan is a story of a mother and her child who were buried in the debris for 40 hours after the shock.  To comfort her child, the mother began to tell a story about Taiwan in the past 400 years. "The relationship between the mother and the child is like a country and its people.  Everything must be connected by love and it is also the most amazing part of all,” he said. EmanuEl said that he needs at least more than a hundred of talents for this music play. "Since it is a story about Taiwan, I hope that most of my actors would be Taiwanese natives,” EmanuEl said. In addition to auditioning Taiwanese talents, EmanuEl, who just arrived in town on Jan. 3, also conducted two 30-minute seminars and shared his experience with students at NTNU on Jan. 4 and Jan. 5 during his tight 72-hour visit to the country. "I would love to show more Taiwanese students how American music play talents would present on stage,” EmanuEl said. EmanuEl is a professor of Theatre Arts at California State University, Fresno.  He is the author of 36 plays and films including Guys Like Me and Bogey, winner of the Edinburgh International Festival of the Arts Fringe First Place Award; Conquest of My Brother, also an Edinburgh Fringe First Place Award winner and nominated for an Emmy Award as a docudrama. Meanwhile, his Liberty Dance of Henry Sparrow also made him a National Festival Award winner of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the recipient of the Laureate Production Award by the American College Theatre Festival.  His Sun Yat-sen in the Mouth of the Dragon was nominated by the World Journal newspaper for a Pulitzer Prize in drama and winner of the Mark David Cohen National Playwriting Award. EmanuEl also received the John F Kennedy Gold Medal for Theatre Excellence, presented by the American College Theatre Festival and received the Distinguished Professor Award from the California State University, Fresno.