There’s a fascinating paradigm shift in the middle of The Hundred Flowers Project, Christopher Chen’s cautionary stage and video thriller. Whether you can believe it or not, the first-act rehearsal of a play about Mao Tse Tung’s propagandistic “Hundred Flowers Project,” “Great Leap Forward,” and Cultural Revolution becomes, in the second act, the sole reality—a self-sustaining play that unleashes its lethal agenda like the computer Hal in 2001. Kinetically enacted by Silk Road Rising in a bold staging by Joanie Schultz, Chen’s ambitious two-act puzzle/protest play conflates two instruments of “persuasion.” Contrasted—but mostly compared—are the Chinese Communists’ bombardment of a cowed populace with false hopes, empty promises and not so empty threats—and our conformity-minded, socially-shaming social media, whose sometimes pernicious influence often masquerades as self-expression and free speech.
-Larry Bommer, Stage and Cinema
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.
-Raymond Rehayem, Newcity
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.
-Jacob Davis, ChicagoCritic.com
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.
-Kerry Reid, Chicago Tribune
"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.
-Phil Potempa, Northwest Indiana Times
“The Hundred Flowers Project” is meta-theatre (a play about itself)...a tyrannical but dynamic artistic director, named Mel (Mia Park), tries to write and produce a play about the Cultural Revolution in China. She encourages the members of her cast to contribute their ideas during discussions in real-time, and catalogue them electronically on a shared document database, but it becomes clear that she is interested in possessing sole control and influence over the play, and she suppresses dissent. There is some highly symbolic and stylized but affecting violence, reminiscent of video footage of any number of totalitarian states, both in the play-within-a-play that the theatre ensemble is putting on and in the actual play which we are watching. The blocking of the second act, in which the characters stand, move, and interact with each other in beautifully stylized and graceful ways, helps the audience feel the tension and violence of the piece. Mia Park gives a wonderful performance as Mel: alternatively deranged, brutal, competent and charismatic, and the lovely Melissa Canciller plays Julie and the Journalist with perfect believability and evokes an empathy for her character with a talent that is as rare as her technique is mysterious and invisible. Ultimately, Hundred Flowers succeeds at what theatre is at its very core: writing, acting, directing, and technical work.
-Lawrence Riordan, Around the Town Chicago
It looks at first like Chen is out to satirize the false egalitarianism and faddishness of devised theater. And to some extent he is. The ensemble clearly regard it as revisionist backsliding, for instance, when Julie naively asks why they can't add a character—a journalist, say—for the audience to identify with. Chen isn't satisfied to leave it at that, though. The Hundred Flowers Project opens out tremendously in its second act, to equate the cruel lies, constantly shifting allegiances, and twisted collectivism (dictatorship of the proletarian, indeed!) with the new tyrannies of social media. The ensemble's little theatrical experiment has somehow gone viral to the extent that it's outgrown auditoriums and even stadiums and become a kind of all-pervasive, never-ending, constantly evolving performative organism that defines (and then redefines) both its creators and its audience according to inscrutable algorithms. 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.
-Tony Adler, Chicago Reader
The Hundred Flowers Project under Joanie Schultz’s vigorous direction is a challenging and exciting work, in which a group of young actors working to develop a script about the Chinese Cultural Revolution find themselves engaging in the same destructive group-think as the political figures they seek to portray.Chen has a terrific ear for phony inclusiveness and for dictatorial behavior masquerading as consensus-building, and those political themes give heft and value to what might otherwise have been an exercise in actors’ being cleverly self-regarding. Mia Park shines as the power-drunk director, and she’s ably supported by the rest of the cast. Michael Stanfill’s video and projections design provide the perfect ominous note of nowhere-ness, of ideas and plans and even people disappearing into a rabbit hole of dishonest nonsense. Well worth seeing.
-Kelly Kleiman, Dueling Critics