As the first residency project of Points, the independent theatre company Vertebra Theatre entered with the new play The Little Pony. Spanish playwright Paco Bezerra, renowned Swiss director Elias Perrig, stage designer Wolf Gutjahr, and renowned actors He Jianze and Tang Yuan stayed in Points for a month of rehearsal and work on this new play.
This work was triggered by the issue of school bullying and is a play about communication.
A child was laughed at, bullied, and excluded from school. The school administration claimed this all arose from the backpack with the cartoon little pony on it that he carried to the school.
Parents try to help the child, but his situation at school continues to decline. A debate about “education” breaks out among the parents, and their differences over the concept of “education” becomes more and more obvious as the situation intensifies. The process of trying to convince each other by holding fast to each own’s views and blaming the other is fundamentally the process of two adults trying to “educate” each other in a marriage. The child at the center of the event never really appears, and the conversation between the parents is therefore empty because of his absence.
The child becomes increasingly eccentric and closed off. In the parents’ seemingly “for the good of their child,” the two are unable to reconcile their world views, and the child becomes a weapon in their war against each other. They hide behind their shields, from where they lob their bombs of he-said, she-said. In the smoky battlefield, the distance between the two becomes a galaxy separated by light years, untouchable, infinitely lonely.
To create the play, young playwright Paco Bezerra borrowed from a real school bullying case that took place in North Carolina in 2014. It is a succinct story that weighs heavily enough of an experience and memory shared by most people in modern society.
In seemingly everyday conversation, the author intentionally adds an unrealistic description of space. As the communication between parents breaks, the boundaries of the room are constantly dissolved and expanded. “The real world we are facing is the projection of our soul.” This quotation from a book referenced by the characters in the play explains that the reality of the stage becomes a true portrayal of the inner state.
