Common Room

Checkpoint TheatreDrama Centre Black BoxJuly 16, 8pm

The meandering conversations of two housemates in their rented apartment are the substrate of this play by debut playwright Ants Chua, which unfurls at a leisurely, syncopated tempo.

As a distillation of a series of hanging-out sessions, it is less detailed thesis than snapshot of the struggles of young 20-something queers in Singapore, presented as they are and without over-explanation.

The two unnamed characters, played by Siti Sara Hamid and Genevieve Tan, are in that youthful time of their lives when they are beginning their careers or attempting to make some money, having moved out of their family homes and having to now wash their own toilets and plan their laundry schedules.

This is a relationship between friendly housemates, so interactions are casual and accidental. Sometimes, exhausted from life, they pass each other po-faced. There is a lot of food chopping, for example, and Tan folds a whole stack of clothes in real time.

Tan being anxious about coming out to their parents in a week gives the play a temporal framework, but time, in this context, is elastic. The titular common room, or the living room, becomes a spontaneous place for unwinding, absent-minded sharing and playful support.

Chua does not really imbue it with a sacred-ness but rather owns the essential prosaic nature of this space. It is profane, too – the two liberally cuss and make sex jokes, with Siti Sara’s embracing of sugar-daddy services supplying much of the material, though the vulgar language is itself integral to queer lingo, a kind of iconoclastic exuberance and a middle finger to middle-class heteronormative mores. It is an assertion of empowering sub-culture.

Sometimes, light and sound shift for more earnest, poetic interludes. Whether one enjoys these sections depends on one’s acceptance of the type of pregnant-pause spoken word and inchworm body movement that are gold in university settings.