Five years ago, Wild Rice began the Singapore Theatre Festival, a biannual platform for new Singaporean plays. In its past two iterations, it’s provided an incubation space for several instant classics: Eleanor Wong’s The Campaign to Confer the Public Service Star on JBJ, Alfian Sa’at’s Homesick and Julian Wong’s musical Botak Boys.

Now, after an extended break of three years, the festival is back with a solid lineup of shows, focused on the themes of politics, race religion, sex and love.

“These pays speak of the Singaporean experience in fiercely passionate and powerful ways,” says Wild Rice Artistic Director Ivan Heng. “Far from merely navel-gazing, they are very universal and human – reflecting the anxieties and fears, the hopes and dreams of our times.”

The biggest seller so far has been Alfian Sa’at’s Cooling Off Day, a confessional play based on interviews with Singaporeans on the General Elections. Folks have also been snapping up tickets for Huzir Sulaiman’s The Weight of Silk on Skin, which presents a rare opportunity to see Ivan Heng playing a straight middle-aged man. Seats are also running out for the ‘Encore’ features: Alfian’s award-winning script Nadirah and Chong Tze Chien’s Charged. Both wrestle with issues of race and religion in Singapore, and are being restaged after successful but limited runs.

However, we at Fridae have decided to turn the spotlight on the “virgin” playwright who’s being featured this year: NUS honours student Joel Tan. He’s written the only specifically gay-themed play of the festival, Family Outing, under the tutelage of fellow festival playwright Huzir, no less.

I’ve known Joel personally since 2009, when he won poetry and fiction prizes at the NUS Literary Society Creative Writing Competition. I’ve watched NUS Stage perform his uproarious student plays Dogs Go Hump Hump in the Night and Lovers’ Pier, and read his angry verses directed at anti-gay pastor Rony Tan, whose church he used to attend.

I’ve also been privy to his brush with censorship this year. His gay slapstick comedy Walking In was originally going to be performed in Buds Theatre Company’s Going Local 2, but it ultimately had to be withdrawn from performance. An excerpt of this playlet will be performed at ContraDiction 8, a literary event in the IndigNation queer pride season which begins today and runs till 13 August.

I’d say Joel’s a voice to look out for. He’s got a great grasp of dialogue, a down-to-earth sense of comedy and a general optimism to his work, making him a truly populist playwright. His script’s in good hands, too: acclaimed theatre and film director Glen Goei has taken on the project, hiring some hot names in the performing arts scene for the show.

So go ahead and book your tickets – and if you’ve done so already, take a moment to get to know Joel a little more intimately.

æ: Age, sex, location?

Joel: I just turned 24, I’m male for the most part, and I live in Pasir Ris, Singapore.

æ: Tell us about Family Outing.

Joel: I can’t give away too much. It’s about a family that’s coping with the death of their son on his one-year death anniversary. As they’re commemorating him, there comes a little fatalistic knock at the door, and a stranger comes in and begins to tell them things about their son they did not know.

It becomes a bit of a family drama, about how they resolve their conflicts. But aside from that, it’s a very strong statement for the centrality of family and love, how this can trump prejudice, polemic and politics. In some ways it’s very affirmative of the Christian faith, although intuitively it may not seem like it.

æ: Who’s acting?

Joel: Karen Tan and Lim Kay Siu play the parents, Doris and Amos. Galvin Yeo, he’s playing Joseph, the dead son. Koey Foo plays Daniel, the mysterious stranger, Johannes Hadi plays Brandon, the younger brother and Andre Chong, who’s this young 12 year-old actor, he’s playing the younger version of the dead son.

æ: You’ve seriously got a 12 year-old actor in this?

Joel: Yes, he’s 12. He’s doing his PSLE this year. I thin they had a bit of difficulty finding parents who were willing to surrender their son to do a play of this nature! But I think he’s actually been tremendous. He seems to be approaching it from a very mature perspective. He doesn’t seem disturbed by any controversial subversive messages, because there aren’t any.

I had very little to do with the casting, but I can’t complain because they’re all very inspiring. They’re all tremendous actors and they fit their roles like a glove.

æ: Will there be any nudity?

Joel: No. This is not a Peter Schaffer play. [He’s referring to Toy Factory Theatre’s Equus.]

æ: You’re promoting a gay-themed play nationwide – are you ready for this? Are you all the way out?

Joel: All my friends know, but my parents don’t. This is going to be interesting because they’re watching the play, and the play is quite unabashedly an imagined autobiography: it’s got my family’s flavour all over it, so I’m curious about how they’re going to react to it. I’ve given myself a kind of a deadline to come out to them. Sometime soon would be good. I’m actually continually inspired by my family. They are extraordinarily good-hearted Christian people of the best kind.

æ: Has it been tough being both Christian and gay?

Joel: I didn’t identify with the cultural term gay until my early teens, but I’ve always known I was a bit against the grain even early in primary school.

And now that you ask me, I realise one of the first places I turned to was the Bible. I flipped open the Student Bible, and at the back under “H” was a list of God’s views on homosexuality. And it was quite dispiriting to see that God thought I was “abominable”. I think it did affect my spiritual development. I tried very hard but I never fit into the right groove of things.

I recently left the church. What Christians call “backsliding”, but I don’t think the action is a backward move. Not for me, anyway.

æ: What about hobbies?

Joel: I like to cook and eat and write and think about food, so actually my life revolves around food. And I make music as well. I always thought I was going to be a musician when I grew up, but that got derailed, I think, from lack of talent. I play the trombone and I play the piano as well. I’ve been involved in the Singapore Youth Orchestra and I play in the NUS Symphony Orchestra. I played trombone in church.

[For the sake of decency, I’ve deleted the excerpt of the conversation where we talked about the “rusty trombone.”]

æ: Your play Walking In was supposed to have been staged earlier this year. Could you tell us how it got censored?

Joel: Buds Theatre Company was going to do a double bill called Going Local 2. After they read of a couple of other prospective scripts, they decided they’d perform mine. But shortly after, when they’d settled the director and the cast already, and I got an e-mail from Claire [Devine, the artistic director] and she told me NAC was giving hm some trouble with funding. Because NAC would not fund their project if the play was in the program. They wanted the project to go on and so they had to replace the play at the very last minute.

æ: Claire told me the cast and director were really disappointed. How did you feel?

Joel: Kind of surprised. It seemed to come out of the blue, actually. I guess I was a bit naïve about it because the play didn’t seem that problematic, and I was disappointed because I was looking forward to seeing a second group perform it – last time it was a student group and this time it was a semi-professional staging.

I think Claire said she didn’t see it coming. Two years ago they did a play with similar themes. It may have been the same wave of changes that accompanied the NAC funding cuts to Wild Rice, because they did cite that in their statement of funding to Buds.

æ: What’ll you be doing after you graduate? Any long-term ambitions?

Joel: As a Lit major we ask ourselves these questions a lot. I don’t want to be a teacher. I actually do hope to be a Writer with a capital ‘W’. I hope to do more theatre, and because I’m quite new to this, I’ve been experimenting, dabbling in different parts of theatre. I want to direct something soon. But more than anything in just want to write more plays.

Ng Yi-Sheng is a poet and playwright, and winner of the Singapore Literature Prize in 2008 for his poetry anthology Last Boy.

The Singapore Theatre Festival runs from 3-21 August. Joel Tan’s play, Family Outing, runs from 17-21 August at the Drama Centre Theatre. Tickets are available from www.sistic.com.sg. To find out more, visit mansingaporetheatrefestival.com. 

An excerpt of Joel’s censored play Walking In will also be performed as part of ContraDiction 8 on 13 August, 7:30pm, 72-13 Mohamed Sultan Road. For more information, visit indignationsg.wordpress.com.