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Assigned Acts

I'm part of a Drama Club in school, and we do plays, in between our administration-assigned... assignments that we get every national occasion. These usually involve coming up with plays that reveal the wondrous origins and nature of celebrations whose wondrous origins and nature have been revealed to us since we were six years old and were yet to discover the wonders of nature that we would at the age of 12 or so.

We're not generally worried about whether or not these plays will be received well, since everything's dead set on going a specific route since the points of time at which they're assigned to us. The contents, and very often the plot, are pretty much expected to be of a certain kind, and the reaction of the audience, if you really want to call it one at all, is generally the same as last year's: Excitement nearly rivaling that of the performers', unless someone's humiliated onstage, in which case it suddenly becomes the best damn play since the other one where Sam got called a girl, or something along those lines.

To sum it all up, the audience's boredom, or at least, their disinterest in what's supposed to be the subject matter of these plays, is always anticipated and quite distressingly, usually ignored. This is where things get ridiculous. The same plays are churned out year after year in schools everywhere, or at least everywhere in this country, and the whole thing ends up looking like tossing stale doggy biscuits at a puppy that always smack it in the head because it's busy ravenously devouring your sofa instead.

So what is it with assigned, occasion-based school plays that make them as appealing as soggy crackers?

Well, to start with, as mentioned before, it's the repetition. The same objectives, the same delivery, the same morals for each play for a a particular occasion. The audience can't ever feel suspense or curiosity when they're already smelling their palms and shaking their heads, muttering "Here we go. Educational play again..." They already know what the play's about and they already hate it before you begin.

Then there's the revolting cheese that accompanies every one of these plays, that sickening skin-invading chill that's bundled with them. The culprit's really the objectives and morals of these plays, which are politically correct and so government sponsored to the point where, whether rationally or not, people can't help but dismiss it. I don't know why opinions promoted by authority are always so unappetizing, but they just are, so performers always end up as "the admin's bitch". Sad and depressingly true.

So how do we save plays for national events, and do we want to? Well, we should. The occasions themselves haven't gotten stale, it's just that the same discussions about them are held every time. So if anything's going to save these skits besides Saxton Hale, it's variety in the way the subject matter is presented and discussed. Which means that we’ve got to move away from reading facts off checklists and going through all the “good” and “bad” perspectives and start presenting some of our own opinions: offbeat, tangent ideas that can be subjected to the ridicule of hundreds.
Why not? They’re better than reciting the same maxims over and over, and they make it clear to the audience that for once, perspectives are no longer restrained to the recommended few. This opens up the possibility of audience involvement, since once audience members realize that opinions just as “improper” as theirs are legitimate, there’s little besides the chronic fear of public speaking and prospect of humiliation that might hold them back, but that’s not really the point. The point is that breaking conventional play objectives will make these plays more intelligent, if not at least more entertaining to the audience.

But there’s an atrocious obstacle in the way. There’s always the possibility that someone in a group of over a thousand, or thousands in other schools (because let’s not forget that we’re a high school/junior college/anonymous schizophrenic group the size of a playgroup), is going to say something that pisses someone off, whether such responses may be rational or not.

But what’s important to note is that such problems are caused by individual ignorance and aren’t the fault of the performers or the administration. For some reason, however, schools administrations are still willing to take measures to prevent this by cutting out content that might incite such problems. That may appear to solve the problem but what it really is is paranoia, sacrificing what might be interesting and engaging content for the sake of eliminating the possibility of any situations later on that could be easily clarified. The option of distancing the views of the institution with those of an individual’s has always been there and it ought to be used.

In addition to the random heckler though, there’s also the risk of the play’s actual content being considered “objectionable” by certain members of the audience, or better yet, by the parents of certain members of the audience. So quite understandably, the administrations of many schools take the safe route, slicing out content that may be “potentially offensive”, or just taking the much shorter route and put bullets through the heads of any plays with such content. But while that’s an understandable reaction meant to conserve institutional image, the problem is that a clear line separating the “potentially offensive” from the acceptable doesn’t exist. No firm boundaries are drawn in the censorship process, and what might be removed from a play may be dependant on the personal opinions and unease of those responsible. This means that script writers are subject to inconsistent, and very often rather paranoid, scrutiny and restrictions.

We’ve just been assigned an orientation play that’s to be held in… well, January next year, and I don’t want to see another play that makes me chomp on my arm again. The title we’ve been given is “Life in NUS High”, and it’s evident that they want this to be a positive, cheery portrayal of a fun and educational lifestyle. Well, bugger that. Any quirks, problems or even redeeming qualities that you find in your current life in NUSHs, go ahead and slap them on the tagboard, because seeing that discussed in a play would be cool.