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.