Singaporean theater group charms with simple appeal

Singaporean theater group charms with simple appeal

By Yenni Kwok

JAKARTA (JP): The Theatre Practice proved that simplicity
charms and does not kill a performance.

This Singaporean theater company staged two monolog plays at
Taman Ismail Marzuki, Central Jakarta, last Sunday as part of
Teater Koma's Pastojak 1997 (Jakarta Performing Arts Market
1997). They were directed by the Lion City's leading stage
director, Kuo Pao-kun.

My Mother's Chest and The Coffin Is Too Big For the Hole
presented chapters from the lives of ordinary people. There were
no elaborate costumes, no fancy sets. Nothing was excessive on
stage.

Behind the modest wrapping, they offered up the
richness of symbolism and imagination.

My Mother's Chest by Zhu Cai-zhen is a heart-wrenching journey
through a woman's bitter past, which is tragically tangled up
with her stepmother's.

The woman (Nora Anny Samosir) returns to her family's old
house after her stepmother's death, and goes through mementoes
kept in a wooden chest.

Each item elicits its own painful memory. Her stepmother hates
her as the daughter of the illegitimate child from her husband's
affair with a cabaret singer. Unable to give birth to a child,
the stepmother adopted a son, who grew up to be a no-good.

Their rivalry made her try to rebel in any way possible. The
more the stepmother resisted, the more she pushed. She married a
man she loved, but the decision was also due to her stepmother's
objections. When the marriage ended prematurely, the woman found
herself back with her stepmother.

Translated from Chinese into English, the monolog accomplished
the amazing feat of telling such a complicated story in only an
hour. Staged in a regular drama performance, it might have taken
more than a couple of hours.

It was heavy with emotion, bouncing back and forth from humor
to anguish. The thirty-something Samosir, a Batak Singaporean,
could shed tears at one point, her voice trembling. A moment
later she was laughing her heart out.

The audience initially sympathized with the main character, as
the stepmother fit into the wicked genre of folktales. A twist
at the end of the tale, when the woman puts on her stepmother's
burial dress and assumes her character, turned the negative
perception around.

She reveals that she contracted a disease from her unfaithful
husband, and this had left her infertile.

Zhu said My Mother's Chest was inspired by the stories of her
relatives.

"When I was small, my family seemed to have a lot of secrets.
I knew things because I was eavesdropping. They never told me
anything," she said.

She pieced these together in the play. "I just imagined most
of the time. I traced and tried to find the missing link and put
them together, just like a jigsaw puzzle," said the 48-year-old.

Yet the monolog is more than just a family curiosity piece, as
it confronts Chinese traditions and women's issues.

There is a reference to how the father forced his wife to
sleep with him on their wedding night, which Zhu said was her
statement on marital rape.

Indeed, My Mother's Chest is a critical, if not cynical, view
of Chinese traditions and how they treat women. The end mocked
these traditions.

A red curtain dropped, adorned with Chinese characters of
"double happiness", a common symbol of wedding. The stepmother
stood behind it in the darkness, wearing her burial dress.

The Coffin Is Too Big For the Hole was a perfect choice after
My Mother's Chest, a light-hearted comic monolog to follow a
tragedy.

Kuo Pao-kun's piece recounts a man's embarrassing but humorous
tale of misadventure at his grandfather's funeral. As the eldest
grandson, the man (Lim Kay Tong) is responsible for the event.

Two hundred friends and relatives are in attendance. They try
to lower the traditional, custom-made coffin into the hole, but
it does not fit.

The grandson quickly rushes to the funeral director, asking
for a bigger plot. The request is rejected due to the strict rule
that one dead man means one fixed-size plot.

The devoted grandson later brings the issue to the officer in
charge. After fierce arguments, including the rejoinder "sympathy
and humanity cannot override the state policy", they finally
allow the grandson his request. But the coffin isn't buried
north-south like the others, but east-west.

The audience was lucky to enjoy the best of Lim. The 43-year-
old actor was outstanding in his rapid, motor-mouthed soliloquys.
He was the dutiful and desperate grandson, but he also
personified the bewildered funeral man and officer.

The Coffin's big message was revealed in Lim's final line.
Pondering about the barely distinguishable burial plots, he asked
himself: "With all of them in the same shapes, will my son,
daughter, grandson and granddaughter be able to find me and
recognize me?"

Conflicting interests in the play pointed up clashes between
modernity and tradition, authority and individuals.

"The modernity has pushed away the individuality," Lim told
The Jakarta Post.

He said his play's most salient example of this was that the
traditional coffin, which was custom made, was rejected. The plot
could only accommodate mass-produced, modern coffins.

Some might claim that The Coffin, Kuo's first English-language
script, was about antibureaucracy. Kuo insisted he had no
political axe to grind.

"I want to start asking what we should do with traditions,"
said the 58-year-old playwright-director. "Is
tradition too big or too clumsy? Is the contemporary life too
small or too quick?"

Established in October in 1986 by Kuo, The Theatre Practice
performs in both Chinese and English. Besides staging regular
performances, this professional theater company is also active in
promoting theater arts to children and youngsters.

The monologues, while based on Chinese
culture and traditions, clearly had a universal and cross-
cultural appeal. Kuo and his troupe once performed My Mother's
Chest in Sabah, Malaysia, to a good response. The Coffin has been
performed by local groups in Bali and Malaysia, even though the
dominant cultures in these areas do not bury their dead.

Perhaps that is because most people could relate to these
plays. After all, traditions and how we treat them are everyday
human issues.