Indifferent, or Strictly Oblivious?

Cyril Wong

Indifferent, or Strictly Oblivious?
Paper presented by Benny Lim (co-written by Cyril Wong) at the Performance Studies international #10 on 15 Jun 2004
Under the Session: "Performing Gay Identities"

This paper deals with my work, Existence, a play with two actors, which was written using poems by local poet Cyril Wong. I will start off with something I read in the second issue of focas.

“The quest for a ‘gay self’…has been reduced to nothing more than a postmodern dialectic of center/margin, homo/hetero, assimilation/disruption, dominant/subordinate, conformity/deviance.” (Purushothaman, Venka. “Redeeming Qualities: State, Sexuality and Asian Boys” in focas No. 2. Singapore: The Necessary Stage, 2001).

This part of Venka’s concluding paragraph serves as a starting point for this essay. Venka’s main gripe against Alfian Sa’at’s Asian Boys Volume 1 was the lack of anything within the play that undermined hegemonic notions of difference and the sexual Other. In fact, the play re-emphasises these notions with its playful mythologising of gay stereotypes. The homosexual as once demonic and unacceptable has supposedly been rendered palatable now by being placed within the context of the carnivalesque and the comic in the play.

Much as it is possible to assert that the gay self is problematic in Asian Boys, it is also probable that any agenda behind reiterating stereotypes may be one of rich and pointed satire. This is probable when the play is contrasted alongside such newer works as Eleanor Wong’s trilogy and Haresh Sharma’s Mardi Gras, where although gay characters struggle with personal and social pressures in a more straightforward and recognisably ‘realistic’ manner, there remains the question of whether the absence of excessive camp and superficial mythologising in such plays mean they better challenge heterosexual discourses insisting upon the homosexual’s social and moral inferiority. In challenging heterosexual discourses, such plays usually offer not only a sober reflection of social, political and psychological issues confronted by homosexuals, but also promoting how in spite of different sexual taste, homosexuals function in more or less the same ways as heterosexuals in any given social context.

But is the desire to be the same really any less problematic than that urging of a difference between straight and gay based on sexual desire, physical fetishisms and camp? Is it not possible to argue that this desire hints at a deeper desire to be the heterosexual discourse, when perhaps such a play as Asian Boys promotes a difference between discourses in a way that is not just satirically aware but also merely honest? By satire, I mean such plays hint at what is wrong behind the celebratory shine of sequins and blatant physical obsessions, although Asian Boys does convincingly suggest that the dramatised problematics within any gay discourse carry the seed of a greater universality within them. A friend once said that homosexual discourse tends to possess traits that are augmented or intensified versions of those in heterosexual discourse. Camp is an intensified, self-aware variation of that which is conventional, but it is this self-reflexivity that is the defining difference. One may argue that the trauma of marginalisation has led not only to this self-awareness, but also to an intensified desire to abide by hastily defined conventions that, alas, often reveal a less than self-conscious agenda. A keening self-consciousness about one thing can lead to blindness to other things. Asian Boys point out these usually irresolvable paradoxes within gay discourse, its degrees of blindness as well as its possible, positive self-reflections.

The whole notion of a sexual identity is, of course, in itself problematic as why should anyone’s identity be so significantly linked to her or his sexual preference? The factoring of one into the other is possible but to what extent depends on the individual, or in the case of public discourse, ideology and power – two of Foucault’s favourite words. However, the individual is inevitably conditioned by the social. For better or for worse, putting up a play with gay themes in Singapore is always an ideological move. Whether these plays play in the hands of the dominant, heterosexual discourses or whether they assert utopian, egalitarian ideals is less debatable than whether the proliferation of gay themes simply repeat the same questions without conclusion (What is gay? Can being gay be one day socially acceptable? Aren’t homosexuals just like anybody else?). The more such questions are heard, the greater the general awareness, leading hopefully to a gradual public acceptance.

The main purpose of this paper spins off from our collaboration: the play Existence based on poems from the book, below: absence, which played both at The Substation in Singapore in July and August 03 and at The Actors’ Studio in Bangsar, Malaysia in November 03. The play was described by Time as portraying the “love of two young Singaporean men for each other as doomed” (Aug, 2003), and it is a useful summary for our purposes here, which move on from just discussing about what gay plays are achieving or failing to achieve in terms of promoting a marginalised voice against the backdrop of a dominant, heterosexual context, whether the agenda is as much economic as well as political, or the problematics of who possesses the right to represent and why. These are all potentially rich mines of issues waiting to be plundered but what we would like to talk about is the process of creating Existence and whether the play was really staged for the benefit (or detriment) of the gay population.

Let us openly admit one thing: although gay (more gay male than lesbian) plays are publicised in the general media, it is mainly homosexuals who attend such plays (and male homosexuals at that). By ‘gay plays’, I do not mean plays that merely have one or more characters who are gay, but plays which not only feature protagonists who are homosexual but whose publicity prominently feature all the relevant visual gay tropes (eg. Toy Factory’s fliers for their production of Beautiful Thing, Livid Room Production’s for Stop Kiss, The Necessary Stage’s for Mardi Gras etc.). In other words, we are referring to plays that overtly push the gay factor.

In Existence, two boys (played by Willy Lau and Lawrence Wong, teen idols from popular television shows Light Years and Moulmein High respectively) meet, fall in love at a funeral, but the relationship does not work and one of them commits suicide. It is a play with a calculated agenda to mostly affect a gay audience. And yes, the targeted audience is most definitely male. This paper hopes to explain the extent of our awareness of how Existenceis positioned within a local context where Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong had just used the ‘g’ word in public and had even gone as far as tentatively repeat a bit of what gays have been saying all along, but this time with more definite consequences. Plays by Eleanor Wong and Haresh Sharma were being performed in more or less the same time. The vibe had been building for a renaissance in the general perspective on homosexuality. The other plays were taking on a self-empowering approach in their plays, but Existence did the opposite by sinking one of the characters into that nadir of despair and self-destruction.

Is this merely repeating another stereotype of the homosexual as a sad loser with a bad ending? Why shape the play in such a way and invite scorn from others too unwilling to be pessimistic when so much optimism about being gay hangs in the air at a crucial moment in contemporary Singapore?

Mardi Gras looked and felt like a conventional pander-to-everyone kind of treat for typical gay audiences with supposedly gorgeous actors discussing the problems of organising a Mardi Gras parade in Singapore. The clichéd and bitchy bantering between characters, the sexual jokes, and lame plot devices, which made the play more like a bad sitcom, aside, Mardi Gras felt more like a opportunity to vocalise issues not openly stated in the public realm, mostly regarding the social consequences of being gay in this country (for e.g., one of the characters does not go to gay pubs because he is a teacher and he does not wish to be seen by his students), than a chance at creating a credible piece of theatre with gay themes.

With Existence, there was most definitely a desire to move away from such issues. With Existencethe intended impact was to achieve the same resonance of authentic experience as a successful poem in the Confessional mode, avoiding the need to make “clear” a political message and a stable narrative to serve as a vehicle to transmit that message. The two boys in the play recite Cyril Wong’s poems like the one below, which is entitled Fundamental (here is an extract):

It returns in the midst
Of a grateful embrace,
And then I understand,
Presently at least, its
Simplicity, so pure to
Mention the misted glass,
The leaden curtains still
As truth on either side
Of the sky would reveal
But too little, too much…

This is interspersed with stark fragments of uneventful dialogue and sudden moments of surrealistic to even ridiculous movement, combining slow gestures with unwarranted, unexplained facial expressions of sudden serenity and peace. If Artaud related theatre to the plague because both destroyed the artificial and orderly veneer of civilization, revealing the ugly realities beneath and returning humanity to a primitive state without morality and reason, Existenceseemed to have cut open the subconscious, peeling away the skin of narrative linearity to expose the chaos of immorality and repressed illogicality in that vast internal neighbourhood of the subconscious. After all, Existence, as the title suggests, reveals man’s anxiety to know and feel that he exists and as what Jean-Paul Satre described, such intensity is the root of man’s anxieties. Satre also described, in his argument of phenomenology, the process of life begins with coming into this world, finding ourselves abandoned, to realise the ‘anguish’ (See note no. 5) and be responsible for ourselves. The whole is meaningless (See note no. 6). These elements are exactly what are crucial in my play, Existence. Still, one cannot deny the fact that a homosexual theme does exist. It boils back to the same questions, whether or not is the play repeating another stereotype of homosexual as negative.

It would make little sense to accuse Existence of merely perpetuating the notion that “gay” and “grief” go together. Many would not guess that the nature of the script is such that even if the protagonists were played by women, or one man and one woman, the play would still “make sense”, as the script is unequivocally gender-neutral, without dealing explicitly with themes about gender politics and sexuality.

The play, Asian Boys Vol. 2, depicted mini-stories about homosexuals living in Singapore. The stories evolved around different venues in Singapore where different gay-related issues are laid out. In one of the stories, a gay spa is used as a ground for gay cruising. One might not see the relation between a spa and gay cruising unless he/she has heard of it or experienced it. In the same story, a old fat man approaches a young muscular chap who, of course, rejects the old man. These situations, in my view, do not help much in understanding gay identity, as they may be typical in the eyes of a particular group of people (the homosexuals), but totally unfamiliar to another group of people. Nonetheless, what Existence and Asian Boys Vol. 2 have in common is in the audience. The main bulk of the audiences consisted of homosexual males. It is also interesting to note that we identify the audience as homosexual based on the stereotypes of what they wear, how they present themselves, the way they move and speak. Such stereotypes are so visible, no wonder Existence was immediately branded as a gay play, another production that was also a consequence of that post-Goh Chok Tong trend in the proliferation of gay themes in the local arts arena.

It would be difficult for anyone to simply accept that perhaps the choice to cast two males was merely a personal choice, as much as the reason for describing a mat as blue in a poem is really an idiosyncratic and ideologically uninteresting choice, as much as the fact that a letter read between the two protagonists in the play was derived from a real letter I received from somebody who stopped loving me. Existence was a self-reflexive, Confessional piece of theatre, except it is not accepted as readily as being Confessional is in poetry. Also, the misconception about Confessional verse is that it is mainly “naval gazing” when so much written in that genre offer successfully that link from the personal to the universal, hence the popularity of this sort of poetry.

Instead of a focus on negotiating with gender or sexual stereotypes, Existence aimed to express something more macroscopic; maybe something about society in general; maybe an evolving, contemporary perspective on what it means to be human. The pressure of the times to discuss salient issues of homosexuality was ignored by the play, but not by audiences who came to watch the play, all of whom immediately came with the expectation to watch a gay play, and left with the same impression that it was only a gay play, albeit a little abstract, a little too poetic and a little too surreal at many points. Richard Chua, my co-artistic director, in the programme notes to another Fun Stage production, Lovers’ Words (about a society in which our contemporary conception of homosexuality becomes mainstream in a dreamed-up society), wrote in Mandarin (translated here), “Maybe, we should start learning how to be a man or woman, then to further understand ourselves as to who we are.” The implication is the same, which is that audiences seem too eager to jump into the pigeon holes of such labels as gay without further exploring the regions of uncertainty still left on the maps of such words as “man”, “woman” or “life”. Existence offers no answers, of course, but further propels that process of exploration.

But alas, it is an uphill task to convince mainstream audiences to see beyond conventional thinking when convention tends toward oppression or repression. The Fun Stage arranged a series of seminars on gay literature that was banned by the media development authority, sparking off responses from activist group, PLU and even such press publications as The Guardian in the UK. The Guardian summed up our society’s perspective on homosexuality with just this concluding one-liner to its report on the ban, “Gay sex is illegal in Singapore (11 Mar 2004).”

The popular view of homosexuality is one based on stereotypes. Was Existence indifferent to the relevance of such stereotyping in our time? No, but it is also not hard to see that it is a compromise to keep reducing art to mere political response. To stage a play with two boys in love is to engage in this type of politics, yet Existence aimed hopefully to transcend this, to achieve more complex responses by raising such questions as whether – to quote from the play – “there is anything left to be learnt beyond the art of a compromise, a sigh.”

Written by Benny Lim
Edited and co-written by Cyril Wong
Copyright © 2004

Notes

1. Asian Boys Volume 1 is a piece of gay theatre by The Necessary Stage. The play was presented in late 2000 at The Necessary Stage’s Blackbox. Written by Alfian Sa’at and directed by Jeff Chen.

2. Mardi Gras is another piece of gay theatre by The Necessary Stage. This is a more recent piece and was presented in August 2003 at Jubilee Hall. Written by Haresh Sharma and directed by Alvin Tan

3. below: absence is the 3rd collection of poetry by Cyril Wong. Published in 2002 by firstfruits publication.

4. Jean Paul Satre, Existentialism & Humanism, Methuen Publishing Limited, 1948, p.12. Phenomenology is a highly scientific branch of psychology, not, like psychoanalysis, concerned with the effective and emotive aspects of the mind and its perceptual faculties.

5. Jean Paul Satre, Existentialism & Humanism, Methuen Publishing Limited, 1948, p.36

6. Jean Paul Satre, Existentialism & Humanism, Methuen Publishing Limited, 1948, p.15

7. Perkins, T.E., ‘Rethinking Stereotypes’, in Michele Barrett, Philip Corrigan, Annette Kuhn and Janet Wolff, Ideology and Cultural Production, London: Croom Health, p. 136 and 137.

8. Asian Boys Volume 2 is part two of the first play. However, it has no relation in whatsoever to the first part. The play was presented in February 2004 by W!ld Rice at The Esplanade Theatre Studio. Written by Alfian Sa’at and directed by Ivan Heng.