"The Ladies' Monologue" Explores Female Friendship, Drama Award Winners to Star

(CNA, Taipei, July 7) After five years of revision, theater director Chou Hui-ling will present "The Ladies' Monologue" at the 2026 Taipei Arts Festival, weaving together dementia, ambiguous female friendships, and family life stories. The winners of the recent Taipei Drama Awards for Best Actor and Actress, Hsu Yen-ling and Lin Tzu-heng, are set to take the lead roles.

Chou told CNA that the inspiration for "The Ladies' Monologue" came from a private "chronicle" passed to her by a friend. Chou explained that the owner of this chronicle was an intellectual born during the Guangxu era of the late Qing Dynasty. He was selected to study abroad in Japan, attending Waseda University's Faculty of Economics. In the first year of the Republic of China (1912), he became one of the core officials responsible for managing the nation's financial budget.

Chou stated that this chronicle, imbued with a sense of "grand history," was discovered in the home of "Auntie Hsu." The subject of the chronicle's daughter is "Auntie Huang" in the play. Auntie Hsu and Auntie Huang were lifelong companions who never married and were independent and self-reliant "old best friends." When their descendants were organizing the room, they were full of questions: "The two aunties slept in the same bed their entire lives, what exactly was going on?"

Chou emphasized that she has no intention of labeling this relationship as "lesbian." "Sixty or seventy years ago, the roommate relationship between women was full of blank spaces for imagination. They slept in the same bed their whole lives, how intimate were they? That is a mystery we can never, and need not, define." Chou does not write stereotypical linear historical narratives. Instead, she seizes upon this mysterious "blank space" and begins her theatrical exploration from the last few days of Auntie Hsu's life.

Chou Hui-ling, after completing her studies at New York University, returned to Taiwan in 1997 and co-founded the "Creative Society Theatre Company." Her works typically use personal and family life stories as an entry point, questioning the reality and hidden meanings behind events within structures of magic and reality, and temporal displacement.

In Chou's arrangement, "Auntie Huang" has been deceased for three years, and the living Auntie Hsu is in a severe state of dementia. "People with dementia have more precise memories of the distant past. In the eyes of normal people, the elderly are always talking nonsense; but in the mental world of someone with dementia, those Shanghai memories from their youth, those ghostly conversations with their deceased friend Auntie Huang, each scene is incredibly real."

For casting, Chou invited renowned Peking Opera actress Huang Yu-lin to take on the role of Auntie Huang. "Yu-lin is not singing Peking Opera this time; she will interpret a full and three-dimensional female character using contemporary performance techniques." The play also features Chou's long-term theater collaborator, Hsu Yen-ling, who just won the Taipei Drama Award for Best Actress in Drama, and the winner of the Best Actor in Drama award, Lin Tzu-heng. This ensemble of seasoned actors will tackle this highly challenging memory puzzle.

"The Ladies' Monologue" by Creative Society Theatre Company at the 2026 Taipei Arts Festival will be performed from September 4th to 6th at the Black Box Theater of the National Performing Arts Center. (Edited by Li Heng-shan) 1150707

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