SELF-REFLECTIVE PLAY EXAMINES UNIVERSAL TRUTHS

Sineenadh Keitprapai and Thanaphon Accawatanyu, two generations of theatre artists, share stories of their dreams, homes and growing up and older in a touching, if not entirely satisfying, collaborative performance, Young Yao (Immature: Adult And Childish Sometimes).

The one-hour piece has Sineenadh’s signature written all over it — intimate, poetic, and personal. The artistic director of Crescent Moon Theatre previously has collaborated with younger artists whose aesthetics vastly differ from hers. The result this time, like when she collaborated with Babymime’s Thongglur Thongtae in Like Teeth And Tongue in 2013, is we get to glimpse another side of Sineenadh and another side of Thanaphon.

The latter is the founder, playwright and director of Splashing Theatre Company, whose bold and unusual work has made him a bit of a critical darling. So it was refreshing to see Thanaphon doing something more straightforward, something that pulls in the audience rather than holding them at arm’s length.

Through this performance, we find that Thanaphon is cerebral to the core. He first became attracted to art through a teacher who exposed him to great artists and artwork from around the world, not through the teachers who taught him how to draw, which is the usual gateway to art in schools. He’s a reflective artist who discovered the pleasure of being an artist intellectually.

As for Sineenadh, we have seen her share stories of her body, namely her mastectomy in her award-winning Shade Borders. Here, we learn about her childhood dreams and aspirations, her motherhood, and how she’s changed through the decades. She is more emotionally raw and exposed than her counterpart.

The show works best when the artists are sharing personal stories and reflections, not when they mistrust the worth of their own accounts by bringing in a flashy game-show segment that makes little sense. Like several of Sineenadh’s previous works,

Young Yao strings together a series of vignettes. This time, most of the vignettes are nice on their own but need a stronger glue to bind them into a more unifying work.

The most interesting element about the piece is less their age difference and how they perceive the world through the years, but more about seeing two artists with different modi operandi constructing their own portraits of how they came to be the artists that they are today.

Young Yao (Immature: Adult and Childish

Sometimes) is on until Sunday, at 8pm, at Crescent Moon Space, Pridi Banomyong Institute. Tickets 450 baht. Call 08-67971445 or 08-1929-4246 or see facebook.com/ Crescent Moon Theatre.