There’s Something About Mary Magdalene
I caught the San Francisco Opera’s world premiere opera setting the record straight about Mary Magdalene as the foremost of all apostles, and boy is my butt tired. My review of The Gospel of Mary Magdalene is on KQED Arts.
Ill Communication
As opposed to the similar portmanteau “Spanglish,” which simply refers to speaking a blend of Spanish and English, the word “Chinglish” has a very specific connotation of amusingly garbled English badly translated from Chinese, especially on signs in China reposted mockingly on the internet. To take two examples mentioned in David Henry Hwang’s play Chinglish, now being given its West Coast premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, a disabled-accessible restroom is labeled “deformed man’s toilet” or the dry goods pricing department becomes “fuck the certain price of goods.” If the latter example seems especially incomprehensible, as the American protagonist Daniel explains in the opening monologue, under the simplified writing system imposed by Chairman Mao, the characters for “dry” and “to do” were merged.
