W!LD RICE presents Alfian Sa’at – In The Spotlight, a festival dedicated to showcasing the brilliant, witty, heartfelt work of one of Singapore’s finest playwrights.
The aim of W!LD RICE’s In The Spotlight series is to provide audiences with a representative survey of a local playwright’s body of work. More importantly, W!LD RICE hopes to examine how these works relate to one another and to today’s audiences.
W!LD RICE presents three works by our award-winning Resident Playwright, Alfian Sa’at. A highlight of the festival is the premiere of Cook a Pot of Curry, a brand new play that takes a hard look at the hot-button issue of immigration and the effect of changing demographics on Singapore culture.
W!LD RICE will also be staging two exciting revivals of Alfian’s previous works – Dreamplay: Asian Boys Vol. 1, a touchstone in Singapore’s LGBT movement; and The Optic Trilogy, a meditation on love and loss that has made its way to Scandinavia and back.
Recognising that theatre does not begin and end with the rise and fall of the curtain, a series of exciting activities have been planned in and around the Festival. These include a new version of Alfian’s smash-hit play Cooling-Off Day, performed free-of-charge, and workshops that will explore the styles, themes and inspirations running through Alfian’s works.
Join us in the theatre – to laugh, cry, and think about our country, our heritage, our relationships and ourselves, through the prism of Alfian’s sharp, insightful writing.
About the Show
A man and a woman meet, seemingly for the first time. Can one single encounter alter the course of their lives?
The Optic Trilogy is composed of three stories, each one a duet between strangers. A tourist has a dalliance with a rent boy she has summoned from the Yellow Pages. A nervous photographer meets a beautiful blind model. A woman audaciously proposes marriage to a man she has just met on the Internet.
Possibly the playwright’s most lyrical work, The Optic Trilogy is a meditation on memory and perception, capturing the poetry of chance meetings in a cold and pitiless urbanscape. In each of the stories, the characters discover how the shock of human contact may lead to the possibility of redemption, forgiveness and even love.
Production History:
The Optic Trilogy was written in 2001, when the playwright was 24 years old. It premiered at the Room Upstairs at the Action Theatre’s Second 42 Theatre Festival, running for a single weekend.
Since then, the play has been translated into Swedish and German. It has been performed as Die Optische Trilogie in Zürich (2006), Berlin (2008) and Munich (2011) and as 3D – en optisk trilogy in Stockholm (2006).
The Optic Trilogy received a Best Script nomination at the Life! Theatre Awards in 2002.
This production marks the first time the play is performed in Singapore in its 12-year history. Directed by Ivan Heng, it stars two leading lights in Singapore theatre: Janice Koh and Brendon Fernandez.
Advisory: 16 years & above (Some Mature Content)
