laremy.sg

We were discussing our annoyance at how people relentlessly compare OTOT to Army Daze, which is, in our humble opinion, missing the forest for the trees. Julian’s words (edited for clarity) are contained within the inline text; my replies in normal text.

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…I guess people use the Army Daze thing because they have nothing to compare it to. If someone else wrote a play about transsexuals, the audience might compare it to Private Parts too.

That’s true. People are always looking for familiarity and something to relate to so they can make sense of the world. Hence the use of stereotypes, which we are both also guilty of using in our plays… Hehe

But as a friend of mine said, there is space in the hearts of most people here to accept another play about the NS experience. If people can’t open their hearts and minds enough to accept that OTOT is different, then they’re missing out on a lot.

NS is experienced by every person here (for every guy that enlists, his whole family and circle of friends go through it with him in their own way) – surely it deserves to be shared and celebrated in more ways and more plays than Army Daze!

P. S. If we’re getting this comparison now, think how terrible it must be for the next person who comes along and writes something about NS!

In this short video clip put together by yours truly, that shows half the cast rehearsing the Prologue.

It’s one of the more ‘serious’ moments in the play, so don’t be fooled by the deadpan acting. Alternatively, check out some pictures of the cast warming up before rehearsal.

Brendon and Terry

Koey, Dwayne, Ghaz and Rodney

Qian Chou and Nelson

More pictures here.

It’s gonna be a great show everyone – I personally guarantee it. Make sure you’re able to say, “I watched Own Time Own Target and was blown away” i.e. buy your tickets now.

I think? Or maybe Ghaz created it. I don’t know. But it rocks, so please watch it!

You may, if you wish, download the latest version of Full Tank! from my wiki. I have only included material up till Act One (or what I have always thought of as Act One, at least) for your reading pleasure.

RATIONALE:

1. You can buy tickets knowing what the writing is like. It may not appeal to you or it may make you more interested in watching the play – I don’t know, because it could go either way. But at least have a read first so that you know what you’re buying.
2. Knowing what you’re buying is important for me, so I’d like to think it’d be important for my ‘customers’ too. I hope theatre productions can start to move in this direction, so if they do, you know who started the trend… LOL.
3. Act Two isn’t included so there is some element of suspense + no need for a ‘spoiler alert’.

Enjoy!

DISCLAIMER: As I mentioned earlier, I think, like, only five people are going to be interested in this. So if you are not one of the five people, you may carry on surfing porn or the like, or whatever it is you are wont to do on the Ingterneck.

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So. Part of the dirty little secret is that as part of OTOT publicity, we’ve been involved in e-mail and face-to-face interviews, pre-recorded radio broadcasts, etc. Now, one very interesting publicity activity/event of sorts which I’ve had to do is to answer two questions via e-mail for The Sunday Times.

My responses are going to be used in a Lifestyle section called ‘Bookends’, which contains information about books that a particular person is reading. I expect it’ll be published next Sunday, since I didn’t see it appear in yesterday’s copy of The Sunday Times.

Now, as we all may or may not know, Gilbert Koh a.k.a. Mr Wang of Mr Wang Says So fame launched his book of poetry last Fri. So, me being me, I decided to take a chance and ask the publishers if I could purchase a copy of Two Baby Hands before its launch, because the deadline for submitting my answers to the ‘Bookends’ column was way before the launch date. Suffice to say, the publishers said yes, and I became a proud owner of Two Baby Hands the week before last!

So this is the dirty little secret that I’ve had to keep for a week or so, because I thought it would’ve been rather immoral for me to gallumph around telling everyone about my purchase.

But what’s the big deal, you may ask, hypothetically, since only five persons are supposed to be reading this, and not all five of those persons may be of the question-asking genus. Some may not even be persons at all, but that is another story for another time.

Well, I’ve been reading Gilbert Koh since 2002/3 when I chanced upon “Chiang’s Heat Stroke” in an anthology called From Boys to Men: A Literary Anthology of National Service in Singapore. So it’s a big deal to me, because I’m a big fan of Singapore + Malaysian Literature, and Mr Wang Says So and Gilbert Koh and… Yeah. You get the idea. Also, I thought it was very good business sense on the part of Ethos Books so I wanted to share this with everyone, in case something similar crops up in your own life in the future.

So! I’ll be blogging about my answers and why I talked about those books some time next week (or the week after) regardless of whether the Bookends column is published or not (because the silence will give me something to talk about too). In the meantime, keep on supporting Singapore + Malaysian literature!