The Hundred Flowers Project under Joanie Schultz’s vigorous direction is a challenging and exciting work... Well worth seeing.
The Cultural Revolution didn't stop even when Mao declared it over; the ensemble's play won't stop for them, either. It's a brilliant conceit.
It’s to everybody’s credit: playwright Christopher Chen, director Joanie Schultz, the actors, and the techs, that this story comes off as highly credible, despite the fact that it is sci-fi and surreal while not appearing to be set in the future.
The Hundred Flowers Project is a new production that immerses audiences in the creation of a play; layered in process, is something that is tough to capture in words. But the themes and ideas are important, once the mind is wrapped around the opportunity to become lost in what is unfolding in each and every media minute.
What does it mean to record your experiences even as you're experiencing them? Are you living a life of pastiche, with the cultural influences and opinions of friends and strangers who are just a click away constantly defining and redefining your own perspectives? Or are you a "narrativist" who seeks to cut a path of orderly storytelling in the chaos of information? There are some undeniably smart and thoughtful insights here into how we craft our viewpoints in the age of instant media. We can "erase" our online presence, but that history is living on somewhere. The multimedia elements, designed by Michael Stanfill, integrate seamlessly with the onstage performances. The beauty of "The Hundred Flowers Project" is that Chen leaves it open-ended enough for you to pluck your own blossoms of insight about messages.
A crafty, circular interplay of “play” and “staging of play”—wherein the director of the show becomes increasingly dictatorial and the participants become increasingly divorced from any solid understanding of the line between reality and fiction, between their own will and the will of their leader...what unfolds connects the structures of two different sorts of leadership (political, or artistic), their manipulated inner circles, and the impact on the masses (society as a whole, or the audience). “Flowers” focuses on the risks of speaking one’s mind in a world where your own mind may be perplexingly subsumed by groupthink. The reliance on multimedia through frequent use of video projection, jarring lighting and sound cues, and quick and substantial set changes must pose notable challenges, but to the credit of director Joanie Schultz and crew, you wouldn’t know it from this adept production. The performances are fine, with Melissa Canciller and Karmann Bajuyo excelling at the center of the revolving narrative.
There’s a fascinating paradigm shift in the middle of The Hundred Flowers Project, Christopher Chen’s cautionary stage and video thriller.
Silk Road Rising’s latest production is the deeply philosophical The Hundred Flowers Project...The endlessly repeating chain of screens and cameras made a fascinating spectacle, aided by Sarah K. Hughey’s lighting and Peter J. Storms’s sound design. Director Joanie Schultz and technical director Jason Pikscher deserve a lot of credit for getting all these elements moving together...The play contains a lot of ideas about how social media seems to be a vehicle for organic expressions but actually result from manipulation, as in the Facebook mood experiment, or allows people to perpetually revise their persona, as with Snapchat.
