Before the play, I had interviewed Feldsher by telephone, explaining the reason for my particular interest. He said nothing to disabuse me of my notion that I would be learning about the life of the historic figure.  I filled my head with pictures of a meeting between Taiwan's history and Jewish culture. 

What a sorry bunch of crap!

Instead of Chiang Kai-shek, we got a sadistic meditation by writer Charles Mee filled with stories about animals being tortured—starting with a tortoise and ending with laboratory rats.  Blinding lights flashed in our eyes, and screeching music well beyond acceptable CNEL levels deafened us.  We too, you see, were being tortured.

Any relationship between this audience abuse and Chiang Kai-shek's regime in China and later Taiwan can only be inferred.  In fact, nothing of Chiang's personal story is told on stage.  Instead a figure called Chek (John Polak) builds a house of cards while he relates stories largely dealing with ways to kill animals.  Somebody call the SPCA!  

While he narrates, a talented dancer (Ericka Moore of the Eveoke Theatre) moves expressively to the horror, and singer Markee Rambo-Hood moves zombie-like through the production, occasionally piercing the air with her screams.  When she does sing, for the most part, it too is about death.  A musician in the back left corner of the stage, Nick Carvajal, although dressed in black, is our only contact with anything resembling normalcy, although he sometimes punctuates the eerie musical score by Tim Root with some strange sound effects—at one time pouring water into a pitcher, at another rubbing a balloon.

Had this play been called, "A Conversation with the Marquis de Sade," "Essays on Animal Torture," or "Death Throes," or anything else delineating its true, sick, subject matter, I might have tolerated the troubling performance—but for the fact that alerted to the true nature of it, I'd have happily stayed away. However,  from the title of the play, to a handout providing a synopsis of the real Chiang Kai-shek's career, the intention seemed to be to dupe theatre goers into thinking this would be a true cross-cultural experience.  Instead we got the culture of being crossed.

Before the show, Feldsher made an appeal to the audience to make tax-free contributions to the theatre.  Afterwards, a companion who was just as angry as I was at being ripped off by deceptive advertising said he wished the Sledgehammer Theatre had pre-paid the postage on all its contribution envelopes. That way, he said, he could grab up fists full of them and mail them back—empty—to treat them with the same contempt they had treated us.

"Don't dignify this show with a review," my companion urged  But when you accept press tickets to review a play, you make a commitment that you will share with your readership your honest opinion.  Forewarned is forearmed.  Several people left in disgust during the middle of the performance.  You can go them one better by staying away!