Organizer and Chair: Laurel Means, McMaster University
(In)Admissable Poetics in the Republic: Abstracting the Nation in the Malaysian
Plays of Kee Thuan Chye
Shirley Geok-lin Lim, University of California, Santa Barbara
On the Malaysian theatre scene, Kee Thuan Chye's plays are of considerable significance not only for the fact that they are popular and in English within a resistant and somewhat hostile pro-Malay cultural context, but especially for their statements about post-colonial transitions. Beginning with Plato's position on the inadmissability of the poet in his Republic, the paper places Kee first within a traditional context, illustrating the rhetorical strategies of abstraction-forms of evasion, erasure, and assertion-that describe and inscribe ideational contours which the poet (and especially the dramatist) can devise. Looking particularly at Chye's plays as an example of state-specific discourse, some comparisons are made with selected texts from Malaysia and Singapore published over the last ten years to inquire how these works, especially those written for the stage, reproduce, interrogate, or contest overt ideologies constructed and privileged in the discourses of state administration.
Sterilized Scalpels, Sharp Needles, Ruptured Sutures: Kee Thuan Chye's Operation
in We Could *** You Mr. Birch
Daizal R. Samad, National University of Malaysia
More than all creative writers using English in Malaysia, the dramatist operates under the glare of authorized or self-authorized bodies who guard the general well-being of the body politic from that which is alien or contaminated. The health-or, in this case, the "Malayness"-of the body politic cannot be compromised, for much more than identity is at stake. This is a nation in which language is linked inextricably to national politics, to educational policies, to religion, to race and cultural tradition. To harm one by adulteration or dilution is to harm all; and the very life of the nation is said to be in danger. The areas of language, race, religion, and politics are not to be discussed openly, for discussion may lead to debate; and debate leads to disharmony, confusion, chaos.
But these areas are the very limbs and organs of the body politic upon which the dramatist uses his artistic scalpel, seeking for signs of malignancy, which, if he finds, he excises by public and dramatic exposure. Then he stitches up again that body which he hopes is now healthier because of his artistic operation.
In We Could **** You Mr. Birch, Kee Thuan Chye uses untraditional dramatic techniques as his sterilized scalpel, ironic humor as his sharp needles, and common involvement in history as his sutures. But because the history is seen as it is or is as it is, the sutures are ruptured. The operation, therefore, does not succeed in healing the body completely. But these are times of sophisticated technology; the entire procedure is videotaped. And the body knows, in reviewing the operation it has undergone, that all is not well, that more needs be done in order that it may heal itself.
Naming the Unnamable: Constructing Homosexualities in Philippine Contemporary
Theater
Chris B. Millado, University of the Philippines
What does Filipino gay theater look like? How do they perform sexuality and difference? What issues, problems and questions are raised in Philippine gay theater as it performs sexual subjectivities? How do the indigenous folk and popular concepts of performance inform contemporary theatrical representations of gender and sexuality?
This paper focuses on the cultural construction of homosexualities as represented in contemporary Philippine theater. The historical and psychic formations of sexual subjectivities as it intersects with class and gender will be a persistent focus in the paper. A critique of both the written and the performance texts of selected playwrights and theater groups define the contours of this emerging locale in Philippine theater. Some of the dramatic texts to be examined include: "Hanggang Dito na Lamang at Maraming Salamat" ("Till then, Thank You Very Much"), by Orlando Nadres; "Kung Paano Ko Pinatay si Diana Ross" ("How I Killed Diana Ross"), by Rody Vera; "Last Full Show," by Chris Martinez; "Karga Mano" ("Leaning to the Right"), by Nicolas Pichay; "Esprit de Corps," by Aureus Solito; "Kumbersasyon" ("Conversation"), by Rene Villaneuva; "Kamatayan sa Paraan ng Rosas" ("Death in the Form of a Rose"), by Anton Juan.
Gender "Roles": Women Writing for Singapore's Stage
Laurel Means, McMaster University
Within the past decade, women dramatists writing for the English-language stage in Singapore have made some exciting and innovative contributions not only to perceptions of the role of women in a rapidly changing post-colonial society, but also to the role of women writers in articulating important gender issues. After all, both post-colonial and feminist writing reveal and challenge traditional power structures, whether imperial or patriarchal. Nowhere is this so effectively demonstrated as in Stella Kon's award-winning Emily of Emerald Hill, a 1985 monodrama which evokes changes in the life of a Straits Chinese matriarch from a male hegemonic colonial period to the complex and often contradictory demands of today's Singapore. But whereas Kon from her earliest plays of the mid-1970s (Bridge, Trial) often combined mythic and archetypal with contemporary societal themes, Ovidia Yu and several recent generation women playwrights opt for more innovative drama in a satiric mode. Yu's Round and Round the Dining Table and her most recent A Woman on a Tree on a Hill, for example, combine gender issues with interracial conflicts and the problems of ambivalent sexual identities. Eng Wee Ling's Confessions of Three Unmarried Women attacks the government's 'Confucian' notion about the traditional duty of women to serve as 'mothers for the nation.'