Chiaroscuro: Curtain Call

I caught a play by myself last Sunday (the day after the final curtain call was made on Chiaroscuro). Two modern noh plays written by Yukio Mishima; Richard Chua was co-director and Mishima is one of my favorite authors. I was late, and there were only two people outside the theater, handling the ticket sales. The lady asks me if I'm a student and I say, no. The guy looks at me and says, "Oh... Sol!"; he turns to the lady and says, "She's an actress."

Nat and Rahiman will kill me for repeating this story, but it really brought home the message. Am I an actor?


screenshots of the DVD that Junior produced for Project Chiaroscuro 2007

In the first place, how did I negotiate between and among the roles of actor, playwright and director?

First, I suppose, I had to grapple with the role of playwright. Rather than use the book as just a point of departure, I really worked more to adapt a 230-page book into 15-20 minutes on stage. This required an intense reading of the book, taking notes, doing further research on the author (especially since his book was semi-autobiographical). What powered me along was the words. Pessoa writes beautifully, and it was a matter of (1) piecing together what struck me the most in his writing; (2) reading common themes throughout what was effectively a journal, and identifying them; (3) trying to form a character. What I ended with, to cut a long story short, is a character who is a woman, a writer, looking for affirmation as an artist and who writes in the belief that her art necessitates cutting herself off from the “vulgarity” of reality and humanity, but at core she is lonely, unloved and thinks that she is ugly.

Second, starting with a script, I had to be an actor and director simultaneously. I had a vision for how I wanted the performance to look (I knew I wanted to play around with a table, chair, notebooks full of writing, a cup of coffee, cigarettes, and a window) and I wanted to convey that the character was alone in her room, speaking to her unseen readers (the audience), speaking to herself. So when I first wrote some stage directions for the script, they were based on a vague idea of what I imagined the performance should be; but I had no formal training either to act or direct and no concrete idea of what I wanted to do. Without Anjeli's help (she made me try to perform the first draft script a couple of times very early on; just before I left for Timor on 21st June) I wouldn't even have gotten a script together.

In the end, became most instructive was actually performing—especially the preview performance that we did barely a week before the actual event. Here, I got feedback from the audience, which included both friends, other people in the theater scene and the Chiaroscuro director-mentors. What they said was that I had stage presence and could create tension within the audience, but what the performance lacked were: clarity (movement and speech), effective dramatic build-up and breaks in the tension, and a lack of conveyance of the motivations for what I was doing. I had further talks with Michael Corbidge and Richard Chua in particular, that put me on track to re-work the sequences in the script and think further about what tension I really wanted to convey and how I should convey it.

Thus, the result was that I re-sequenced the script. I let the audience in first, to see the character, lonely and alone, before going into this whole diatribe of how life as we know it is not really life, how everything is nothing—the whole existentialist shebang. I reduced the words and cut the script down by a third of the original. There are three movements in the performance.

Click here for the full script and images from the performance.

First, I show with hardly any words, the lonely writer; alone in her room, writing in a frenzy but finding it hard to concentrate. There are distractions she needs to overcome: street noise from outside the window, which she shuts; food and drink on the table—she’s hungry but can barely stop long enough to have a proper meal; she spills her coffee and almost ruins her work... The reward is finally getting a clear thought through; and she lights a cigarette and enjoys her little triumph.

Second, she starts to reveal what she’s been writing about. She feels defensive, as if her little victory is empty. She lashes out that she, alone in her room, knows better than anyone about what the meaning of life is. But she starts to reveal that this knowledge is painful.

Third, there is another battle: she wants to continue to write, but she is distracted by the life outside her window. She goes to the window and tries to see whether the beauty outside is reflected in her. But it’s not, and she reveals her true fears. That she is nothing, that her life and her writing mean nothing, and she tries to reject all her work.

Finally, resolution: she cannot reject her work nor her life. She picks up her writing and leafs through it, seeing the beauty of the characters she has created. And this is the truth of her life: to produce art, she took herself out of the stream of humanity (even if she suffered for it with her loneliness), but by creating art, she has contributed to humanity. She returns to her table, and as a reward, lights a cigarette.


here's a little self-promotion... heh heh

It was my interaction with the directors and the other actors, that was most instructive. I learnt from their advice on how to better bring out the dramatic tension in what I wanted to convey with my performance, and from the excellent talents of the other actors, I learnt how to use more visual cues and other means like my voice; demonstrating how little challenges (distractions) needed to be overcome in order to win small victories (writing, deserving a cigarette), things like that. I would not have been able to do this alone.



At the Q&A with the audience after my last performance of From the Book of Disquiet, I said something that I hadn't verbalized until that moment: "I could no by measure or account have been considered an actor; but now, maybe I can start to define myself as one."