"PLAYFUL PHOENIX": FEMINIST MANIPULATIONS OF THE GAZE IN CONTEMPORARY SINGAPORE PLAYS

This paper examines recent Singapore plays by women for the dramaturgical and performative strategies adopted in dismantling the gaze and de-essentialising the gender assumptions that underlie theatrical representation. The majority of these strategies involve postmodernist deconstructions of the traditional performance apparatus or disruptions of conventional stage space and scenography. Even the few plays which are couched in the realist mode, and mistakenly assumed to be re-enacting and reifying the male trajectory, are no less subversive in their subtle manoeuvres to ambiguate and de-stabilise spectator positions. The contributions of the theatre director in furthering the feminist agenda of these playwrights will also be considered.

Key Words: Singapore theatre, feminism, gender constructions, postmodernist strategies

The first Singapore play ever to receive a "Restricted" rating (in other words, granting admission only to those over the age of 18), Chin Woon Ping's Details Cannot Body Wants (Chin, 1993), has one powerful scene among many others, in which the female protagonist resists fetishization of her body:

(Removing the kimono, removing the bra and the underpants, standing straight and facing the audience, in an even voice, repeating the chant as many times as she likes, with growing conviction)

I am not my breasts I am not my chin I am not my arms I am not my neck I am not my womb I am not my lips I am not my breasts (Chin, 1993, 111)

By calmly removing her attire and fixing the audience with a resolute stare, the performer here is stressing self-reflexiveness about her status as representation. She is also, like the subjects of many of Alice Neal's paintings, fixing "the viewer with penetrating gazes that demand a stare in return" (Heller, 1987, 148). Through her incantations, which seems to have a thaumaturgic effect as they accompany increasing conviction, the performer displays the social constructedness of her body, which she is resisting through the series of denials and negations. Chin's piece, grossly misunderstood by some Singapore critics, was summarily dismissed as a "mish-mash of sorts" (The Straits Times, September 14, 1992), her detractors having failed to observe the plethora of feminist devices employed to disrupt, dismantle or return the male gaze.

In spite of the popular image of the arts scene in Singapore as being under draconian control, where theatre that does not fall within the government's agenda are marginalised, censored or banned, recent Singapore plays by women have employed many feminist devices. I refer in particular to plays in the recent anthology, Playful Phoenix: Women Write for the Singapore Stage (Chin, 1996). In commenting on her choice of title, the editor of the anthology, Chin Woon Ping, highlighted the phoenix as "a popular symbol of the female principle"(Chin, 1996, iii), especially in terms of "its capacity for flight and transcendance"(Chin, 1996, iii), as well as drawing attention to the androgynous origins of the phoenix (incorporating the male ideogram feng with the female ideogram huang) in Chinese iconography. This ambiguity in the title, according to Chin, will hopefully serve to "de-essentialise notions of gender and women's identity" (Chin, 1996, iii), as indeed many of the plays contained therein do.

This has prompted at least one recent study of the Singapore theatre scene to affirm that, notwithstanding the patriarchal stronghold that the government exerts on the arts, "theatre was the least patriarchal of all the industries" (Ngiam, 1997, 40), and by extension, that "patriarchal influences in the theatre seem to stem more from the bigger structures operating than from the micro-level of the theatre"(Ngiam, 1997, 40). Recent Singapore plays by women evince strategies that are overtly feminist in terms of their aesthetics as well as their interventionist stance within the patriarchal order, particularly in the way the latter communicates meanings as the dominant ideology.

In order to ascertain what recent Singapore plays would fall under this category of the interventionist, one needs to have a clear idea of what defines feminist drama or feminist aesthetic, and what is considered to be a characteristic style in feminist theatre. In the West, there has been much debate over the definition of feminist drama. Megan Terry refers to the "creation of powerful autonomous women characters" (Terry, 1987, 328). Karen Malpede sees feminist drama as that which depicts "women surviving and creating new human communities out of the wreckage of the past" (Natalie, 1985, 41). Janet Brown labels a play feminist if "women's struggle for autonomy is the play's central rhetorical motive" (Brown, 1979, 1). These diverse perspectives are complicated by the spectrum of theoretical approaches to the study of feminism, ranging from that utilising the terms and precepts of anthropology and psychoanalysis to that based upon the principles of literary-criticism and film theory.

Further exacerbating the issue is the fact that the feminist movement in the west has undergone various phases as well as taken up different ideological positions. Liberal feminism stresses women's parity with men in all spheres but ultimately subsumes and absorbs women into the male generic. Sue Ellen Case puts it most succinctly when she characterises the limitation of this school of feminism as "reviving the old male model of the Romantic movement" (Case, 1987, 4) where the oppression of women disappears before the universal and eternal qualities of art, without ever questioning if those selfsame qualities have rendered women invisible in the formation of the canon. Cultural or radical feminism, on the other hand, is concerned with the development and preservation of a female counterculture deemed as superior to that of men, thus reifying the biological differences between the sexes and resulting in a new monolith: the hegemony of the feminine. By positing that biological constitution is the most important difference between men and women, cultural feminism ends up propounding a new, equally reductive essentialism rather than abolishing artificial gender categories.

Currently, the most balanced school of feminist thought is said to be that of materialist feminism, which seeks to deconstruct the mythic subject "Woman" by depicting women as a class oppressed by social relations, and by inquiring into gender dynamics in relation to the flux and material forces of history. Rather than dwelling on transcendent universals, materialist feminism construes women as historical subjects interacting with prevailing social structures and conditioned by the variables of race, class and sexual orientation. By minimising the biological differences between men and women, materialist feminism sees gender polarisation as a social construct detrimental to both sexes. In theatre, materialist feminism is particularly useful because it strives to denaturalise the psychological identification processes implicit in cultural representation, by exposing the representational apparatus and foregrounding any ideological assumptions.

When feminist theory and gynocritics were at their infancy in 1982, feminist drama simply referred to drama which depicted a woman seeking autonomy in an unjust patriarchal world. But it is now generally accepted that feminist drama is not simply about trying to locate women within a dramatic heritage, tradition or canon. Rather, feminist drama should show women negotiating the barriers and boundaries inhibiting them, or testing the framework and extending the parameters of feminist discourse, or trying to confront the limits and definitions imposed on them by society as well as by themselves. In regard to the latter, feminists propound that the literary-cultural trope of men's "emasculation" by women should be replaced by the "inmasculation" of women by men, where women are socialised into identifying with the male perspective and accepting it as normative (Fetterley, 1978, xx). And if feminist drama necessarily entails a feminist aesthetic, the latter would refer to a disruption of the doctrines of taste aligned to a male theatrical tradition. The concept of an aesthetic is therefore wrested from its reactionary connotations as an autonomous neutral zone inhabited by truth and beauty in order to incorporate the political and ideological aspects of cultural production that have too long been occluded. Jill Dolan, for example, emphasises a necessary link between feminist aesthetic and ideology: "feminism loses some of its polemical force if it is not linked to a coherent ideological structure" (Dolan, 1988, 3).

In attempting to situate feminist theory in the Singapore context, and to interpret a form of feminism that is relevant to Singapore, one has to take into account the unique cultural make-up of our society. Feminism in Singapore is essentially a complex of features of the various strands of feminism in the West, and this variegation is reflected in recent Singapore plays with a feminist slant. It has been observed that owing to an inherently male-biased government and male-controlled sociopolitical infrastructure, the women's movement in Singapore has not resorted to aggressive lobbying for women's rights nor promoted a radical kind of feminism which seeks to implement its own alternative discourse. This seems to suggest that liberal feminism, which places emphasis on gaining equality for women in male-dominated sectors, is the groundnote of feminist practices here.

But unlike the West, where the concept of feminism as "advocacy of rights of women" rather than merely "the state of being feminine" was entered into the Oxford English Dictionary as recent as1972 (Gillespie, 1995, 101), many indigenous Asian cultures of which Singapore culture is a diaspora, are matriarchal or matrilineal, where women have only started to lose power in the face of modernism and capitalism. Fredric Jameson's statement, that ours is a culture suffering from amnesia rather than aphasia, has special relevance to our Asian context, where the basis of many systems of symbolism and orders of mythology is matriarchal, and where women, as Ron Gluckman has noted in a study of women politicians of Asia, are still looked upon as the repositories of culture and tradition (Gluckman, 1997). That feminine power in Asia is legitimised only by its connection to patriarchal structures is a relatively modern phenomenon. Maila Stivens has suggested that male Asianists and Eurocentric feminists have largely failed to see the significant role of women in many nationalist struggles in this region or to note that these struggles predated much of the invention of feminism in the West (Stivens, 1991, 20-21).

Nonetheless, on account of the heterogeneity occasioned by the variables of race, ethnicity, educational standard and social class in Singapore where there is definitely no "seamless category of women" (Butler, 1990, 4), the perspectives of materialist feminism enjoy the most topicality, particularly in the manner in which materialist conviction is often tied to post-structural, postmodernist epistemology in the West. If according to materialist feminism, gender and identity are cultural constructs produced by material conditions, then Teresa de Lauretis is right in asserting that the identity of a woman is "multiple, shifting, often self-contradictory" (de Lauretis, 1986, 9), neither a "universal" (a generic non-gendered being) nor an oppositional "feminine" subject defined by negativity and silence (de Lauretis, 1984, 161). This idea of a mutable, endlessly evolving subject-in-process deconstructs any universal, absolute category of "Woman".

What one notices, when examining recent plays by Singapore women, is a "playful pluralism" (Kolodny, 1985, 161) in terms of feminist strategies. Additionally, in view of Singapore's postcolonial status, Francoise Lionnet's term "metissage" is also pertinent, in depicting the "braiding of cultural forms in a work which re-evaluates Western concepts and rediscovers the value of oral and other cultural traditions" (Miller, 1995, 156). This reflects the lately accepted notion that there is no definable style to feminist drama, certainly not in a formalised, monolithic way. As Silvia Bovenschen has remarked: "No formal criteria for feminist art can be definitely laid down" (Bovenschen, 1985, 48). Therefore, to insist that feminist plays must adhere to a certain shape, style or dramatic form is to, once again, practise essentialism. Instead, feminist playwrights are freed from calcified debate over the existence of a uniquely feminist style. As long as a feminist can "assume herself" (be reconciled to her own power) and construct an "enabling relationship" with language, feminist art is in the making (Jehlen, 1984, 582).

With respect to theatre practice, the next step is to recognise theatre as an important site for the imposition of ideology. To quote Michelle Barrett, "ideology is a generic term for the processes by which meaning is produced, challenged, reproduced, transformed. Since meaning is negotiated primarily through means of communication and signification, it is possible to suggest that cultural production provides an important site for the construction of ideological processes" (Barrett, 1985, 73). The entire procedure of representation in cultural production is not simple mimesis, since art mediates rather than mirrors social relations through a schema of signs. Herbert Blau puts it in a nutshell when he asserts that "everything in the structural reality of theatre practice is ideology" (Blau, 1983, 447). And since ideology is rarely "a set of deliberate distortions" but more often "a complex and contradictory system of representations (discourses, images, myths) through which we experience ourselves in relation to each other and to the social structures in which we live" (Newton & Rosenfelt, 1985, xix), feminist drama has to capitalise on a whole range of strategies and manoeuvres to expose the insinuations of patriarchal ideology in their fashioning of femaleness.

In examining the feminist devices in recent Singapore plays by women, I will look at both theory and practice. The phenomenon of a male director at the helm of a feminist play, a common enough occurrence in Singapore where most directors are male, inevitably raises the question of whether a male director can articulate feminist agenda while saddled with a positional perspective which remains once removed. In response to this, it must be observed that the typical Singapore director is fairly enlightened in his dramaturgical approach and rehearsal techniques and rarely styles himself as an omnipotent regisseur. Recent interviews with several Singapore theatre companies with regard to their modes of operation revealed that most believed in a collaborative ethos, where the performer is empowered with a voice and an opinion instead of being controlled like an ubermarionette (Ngiam, 1997, 25-33).

At least one major male director stated categorically that he often chooses plays with "feminised" (meaning "open to alternatives, to other emotions, thoughts and feelings...suppressed by the patriarchal system" (Ngiam, 1997, 30)) if not "feminist" characters in order to provide a space for the affirmation of marginalised identities. In so doing, he "questions the mainstream's ideology by re-framing certain aspects of it in the hope of exposing a bias in thinking" (Ngiam, 1997, 31). Concomitantly, his rehearsal techniques involve using gesture and movement to create and explore character and theme (akin to the Brechtian notion of gestus which has influenced much materialist feminism), rather than resorting to concept-laden discursive justification with its emphasis on logocentricism. This recalls Helene Cixous's idea of l'ecriture feminine which, apart from being a new kind of textuality that arises out of female sexuality, also undermines the authority of the text by privileging body/gesture as the primordial essence (Cixous, 1984). Allowing the performers to embark on a process of self-discovery also breaks down the typical hierarchy between the director as auteur and the actor as someone who merely carries out instructions. This strategy is particularly helpful to female performers who bring a different emotional palate to the acting process and are inclined to rein in rather than acknowledge their rich emotional resources. Working in a mutually respectful, non-hierarchical, and open atmosphere enables these female performers to focus, clarify and cast off their inhibitions against public expression of their rich sensibilities.

I have categorised feminist devices in recent Singapore plays into four large divisions, none of which are neatly self-contained or absolutely discrete but do serve nonetheless to reflect an increasing degree of feminist intervention:

1) Disrupting the Gaze: this refers to strategies which create barriers or resistance to the male gaze, making it less straightforward and more difficult to objectify the female body on stage. A primary strategy is the Brechtian model which analyses gender within material conditions to show that gender, like other social constructs, is relative rather than absolute, alterable rather than permanent, disparate in nature rather than essentialised, contextual rather than existing in a vacuum. Many of Brecht's distanciation techniques are used by contemporary Singapore playwrights, such as the disruption of realist conventions of staging, casting against convention, the use of puppets/dolls/masks in a "gestic" manner to examine gendered relations and the incorporation of an element of historicisation.

Leow Puay Tin's Family, as the playwright herself describes it, "is a rambling epic of sorts that covers nearly a century of a family's history" (Leow, 1996, 162). Befitting Brecht's notion of historicisation, Leow uses time as an organising principle. Her play consequently takes the form of a series of vignettes, what she herself calls a "loose chronological and non-dramatic metanarrative" (Leow, 1996, 162). The form recalls Brecht's episodic structure, where each episode is prefixed by a subtitle, in this case, Yang Men or Nine Widows or Kueh Sellers. Just as a prospective director is authorised by Leow to use all her material or delete any which does not fit into his directorial vision, the spectator is encouraged by the tenuously linked episodes to interpose his critical judgement. In the process of viewing a play in which the matriarch of a clan is instrumental in keeping its members together over several generations, the spectator is made to recognise women's vital roles in the vanguard of pioneering families. When the men of the Yang family leave their ancestral hearth to make their mark elsewhere, it is the Yang women, the grand matriarch and her daughters in-law, who function as their emotional anchors and also salvage the family's flagging fortunes with their cottage industry. As the family grows in financial stature and strides into modern times, the Yang women also show increasing emancipation from social mores: one is an unmarried mother while others are at the forefront of the Yang business empire. That some of the younger generation of Yang sons are more than reluctant to inherit control of the business further breaks down the traditional binary opposition in which the male ventures forth into the public sphere while the female tends to her domestic duties.

The director Ong Keng Sen intensifies the Brechtian qualities of theatricality by envisaging the piece as multi-focus, environmental configuration, siting his production in an old Amoy Street shophouse with the different vignettes enfolding (in a different sequence every night as determined by the preference of the audience) in different rooms. Spectators are encouraged to wander and loiter wherever their whim takes them and to piece together an individualised experience of the production for themselves. The flexibility of narrative sequence is accompanied by the simultaneous enactment of different episodes in different parts of the house, offering a wide spectrum of spectating options and thereby disturbing the one-way direction of the gaze. That the episodes can be assembled and reassembled in any order also recalls Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt, where the spectator is kept at an objective distance from the narrative rather than be drawn into emotional empathy by a dramatic plot that proceeds accretionally from conflict to catastrophe. Ong has also made the different positions of gender and sexuality more pronounced with cross-gender casting. Most of the Yang women are performed by male actors, heightening the self-reflexiveness of role-playing as well as pointing to a conflict between the visible tropes of representation and their underlying identities.

By using multimedia and by manipulating the frames of his piece, Ong also transforms the idea of scenography into a site of "looking-at-being-looked-at-ness" (Diamond, 1988, 84-9). Television monitors and video projection liberally stationed all over the house, besides imparting the authoritative feel and tone of docudrama, also create layers upon layers of frames even while the primary frame around the acting space has been obliterated by the lack of proper demarcations between actors and spectators. Consequently, Cartesian duality is being negated by the phenomenon of our watching others being watched. (Ringer, 1995, 303). Leow has also provided a lengthy narrative by the matriarch, Tan Neo, which director Ong has recorded into an audio-cassette which the spectator can listen to while engaged in peripatetic journeys around the three-storey shophouse. Here, Brecht's concept of historicisation translates as the feminist idea of historicity, as the specificities of the matriarch's life are made known to the spectator. Just as Brecht's historicisation intervenes in the gaze by inserting an element of distance (and in performative terms, by subverting the lamination of body to character in traditional iconicity), historicity as employed here intervenes in the gaze by individualising the stage abstraction "Woman".

Apart from individualising women by delineating what Elin Diamond calls "the multiple and complex signs of a woman's life" (Diamond, 1988, 89), another Brechtian device which compels the audience to confront gender stereotypes is the splintering of the central female protagonist. This could result in either the "split subject", where the protagonist (as akin to Brecht's Mother Courage or Good Person of Szechuan) is composed of irreconcilably antonymous traits, or the "collective subject", where a group of women collectively constitute a self, what Honor Moore otherwise calls a "choral play" (Moore, 1987, 188). In either case, the schizophrenic expression of self or its dessication into fragments show that psychic coherence is difficult for women to achieve in a misogynist society. The unnamed trio in Dana Lam's Ordinary Women (who are differentiated one from the other by numerical suffixes: Woman 1, Woman 2 and Woman3) collectively articulate the dilemmas of being female, each embodying a different vestige of male oppression. Like Leow's play, Lam's Ordinary Women (Chin, 1996) is devoid of traditional plot structure, with a largely symbolic rather than iconic mise-en-scene. Three women reconnoitre the failure of their respective lives in a barren landscape while waiting for a bus that will supposedly take them on a journey of escape and self-discovery. There is a gaping chasm in the road which each needs to bridge, but not before overcoming her fears, uncertainties, anxieties and other emotional demons. In the interim, each woman attempts to light a row of lanterns strung across an otherwise bare stage, betokening by that gesture an effort to shed light on their respective quandaries as mother, daughter, wife or mistress.

Equally disruptive of realist conventions in terms of both the text and its materialisation is Chin Woon Ping's Details Cannot Body Wants. The latter is essentially a four-part performance art piece exploring the four large bugbears of a woman's lot: the "details" or minutiae she is saddled with; the denials (or series of "cannots") she faces in attempting to shape her own identity or destiny; the cultural representation of her "body" as an object of male desire; her socialisation into becoming an inveterate consumer with myriad "wants", in hankering after which she often compromises or effaces herself. Because of its nature as a performance art piece spotlighting a solo female performer, Chin's play demanded special measures to prevent an unwitting capitulation to male scopophilia. As the director of that production, I was careful in avoiding pink or lavender lights that would enhance skin tone. Instead, harsh lighting alternated with strong chiaroscuro to point to the self-conscious theatricality of the piece.

Another way by which Chin's play drew attention to its status as theatre is its inclusion of a three-person chorus, quasi-Noh style in terms of the sounds it generates. This chorus functions in a dialectical manner to the female performer by being synchronous with her at certain moments and diachronous at others. Among its members, the chorus exists in harmony sometimes but at other times as a cacophonous unit. Chin's play depicts a whole range of female figures, from siren to ingenue, and cuts across both Western and Eastern stereotypes, to suggest that the pigeonholing of women is an inherently futile exercise. She also interacts with an inflatable sex doll in order to create 'gestus" that encapsulates the state of certain gendered relations. What she inflicts on the inflatable doll as she intones the following litany of grievances is a visual catalogue of the long history of violence, physical, sexual or emotional, done to women by men:
When he cuts into me when he slices into me when he stabs me
When he stalks me when he hits me when he slaps me
When he throttles me when he poisons me when he maims me
When he chains me when he traps me when he sells me
When he brands me when he ropes me when he tattoos me When he cripples me when he burns me when he dumps me When he hangs me when he shoots me when he snuffs me
(Chin, 1993, 110-111)

The use of masks in Chin's play is also significant. In the semiology of theatre, the mask alludes to the possibility of different personae behind it as well as inducing recognition of our habit of projecting upon its blank face our private desires and fantasies. This parallels the patriarchal objectification of women, which involves fashioning the image of women to its taste and denying the underlying reality.
A final manoeuvre in disrupting the male gaze is the use of a male narrator who distorts or diminishes the sympathetic representation of a female protagonist. For example, Ovidia Yu's The Woman in a Tree on the Hill is essentially a two-hander with an unnamed Woman and a male Narrator assuming multiple roles as Noah and his wife, Paul and Nora, Nu Wa and sage, consecutively.

Narrator: (to audience) Through the ages it has always been a Woman's lot to be weary and comfort the weary. (To Woman) Nora, you're always too tired...

Woman: But Paul, I'm always so busy Paul. There's always so much to be done...if only you didn't throw your shirts onto the floor after you're tried them on and decided not to wear them...

Narrator: Nora, I resent the way you always manage to imply that I don't pull my weight around the house. You always do that. You never give me credit for all the work I put in to support us in our standard of living!

Woman: Paul, I never meant to imply ---

Narrator: I'm sorry, Nora. I've tried to make this marriage work, God knows I've tried. Even though my mother always said that no good would come out of marrying a girl without a university degree, I tried --

Woman: Paul, Paul, what are you saying?

Narrator: If you just listened to me instead of bleating off in a hundred directions you would know what I'm trying to say.

Woman: But Paul, I'm not sure if you would--

Narrator: Nora, I'm sorry. But we both know that this is over. There's no point in playing games any more, is there?
Let's be...reasonable.
Let's be...civilised adults.
Let's be...friends.

Woman: Friends! Paul, I'm sorry, I really don't understand.
(Yu, 1996, 9-10)

In the above excerpt from Yu's play, which is all about jockeying for power, the narrator has, by means of a few verbal sleights of hand, monopolised the conversation, usurped the role of plaintiff and gained control of the situation. The poor woman is not given a chance to complete her utterances, but rather, in circumstances heavy with irony, is presented with a fait accompli and further browbeaten into apologising for the possibility that she may have been unreasonable or uncivilised. Here, the audience is compelled to synthesise the disparate elements by separating what they hear from what they see. In deciphering the unspoken power dynamics, the audience is made to reconsider their perspectives on gender.

2) Dismantling the gaze: this encompasses all strategies which deconstruct the image of Woman on stage, either by de-assembling its armature, tearing apart its constituents or by subverting the codification of feminine behaviour. A primary device is the manipulation of what Elaine Aston has called the "vestimentary codes of gendered costume" (Aston, 1995, 94) This could take three major forms. The first, "overdisplay", is rooted in the philosophy of the cabaret. Traditionally, cabaret denotes a space for the performance of sexuality. Hence, tapping into the cabaret form concretises the link between the performance of theatre and the performance of gender. Overdisplay involves a travesty of the stereotypes of glamour and sexiness. In this instance, the female body is all too deliberately, and one might add excessively, constructed as spectacle. This is spectacle as Unabashed exhibitionism, which foils the habit of voyeurism by being the polar opposite of peekaboo.

In her performance art piece Details Cannot Body Wants, Chin envisages her costumes to be inordinately tarty, such as "the mama of undies, adorned with bows, lace, plastic fruit such as cherries, strawberries, trinkets." This costume is then "suffused in a lurid glow" (Chin, 1993, 100). In another sequence of her play, she dons a special bra, with balloons sewn into its inseam, which is then attached to the nozzle of a pump. The bra can therefore be inflated to suggest a bosom of monstrous proportions that ends up ridiculing the popular male obsession with women's breasts. As a metaphor of the objectified woman, the inflatable sex doll serves a similar purpose.

Taken out of the boudoir and public displayed, with legs perpetually splayed in a sexually receptive position and with garish red mouth designed as yet another orifice for the salacious-minded, the doll no longer looks titillating. Chin's deconstructive use of costumes and accessories is no different in intent or effect from Annie Sprinkle's invitation to inspect her cervix during a performance, which leads to clinical detachment rather than sexual arousal in her audience. Defeating the idea of scopophilia also means debunking the related notions of subject-formation and psychological transference inherent in the male-biased theories of Freud and Lacan, where the female body is posited as consumable object in a process of sexual differentiation which mirrors Lacan's mirror stage.

At the other end of the continuum from "overdisplay" is "underdisplay", which overturns the expectations of the female body on display. Either the body is hidden or glamour is parodied by shoddy costumes that conceal more than reveal. In Tan Mei Ching's Quiet the Gorilla (Tan, 1996), the metaphor of showering is predominant. The female protagonist is desperate for a wash but has to fend off the unsolicited attentions of a crank-caller, who is nursing masturbatory fantasies about her prospective ablutions. But these fantasies, and those of any male member of the audience who elects to identify with him, are soon dispersed by a scenario that entails all manner of domestic crises, from broken faucets and bars of soap that unwittingly land in the toilet bowl, to the unexpected arrival of runaway siblings and bizarre dreams of a runaway circus. That the leitmotif of a woman showering and the attendant images it conjures up have been dissipated by mundane details of the narrative is a ploy borrowed from the realm of feminist art. According to Rosemary Betterton, feminist art challenges the traditional idea that the aesthetic value of the nude is necessarily tied to the sexual desirability of the model. Instead, it seeks to present a stark, unromantically frank picture of the nude in order to reduce its visual desirability (Betterton, 1988, 250-71). The last among the trio of devices is "cross-gendered display", which refers to the mixing of vestimentary codes as another way of troubling gender. Ong Keng Sen, when directing Leow's Family, opted for gender-neutral costumes paired with red stilettos. The fact that he cast mostly male actors in the roles of the Yang women further signalled the "not but" critique of gender representation. Having a man play a woman while dressed in costumes that combined features of both the masculine and the feminine underlines the arbitrariness of gender categories.

Yet another means which these recent Singapore plays have used in dismantling the gaze is to present a woman as a metatext, in other words, to reveal the socialisation of her body into its characteristic composite of gestures and movements and to suggest that "playing woman" is a role foisted on her in everyday life. The middle sections of Chin's piece, namely Cannot and Body, are all about how a woman's physical sense of self is made to conform to certain male expectations. Chin begins by arrowing in on the cruel Chinese practice of footbinding. The grandmother of the Woman in the play has internalised the male myth of beauty: "when she was four, or was it five, she begged to have her toes broken and smashed, and to
be bandaged so tightly until a few finally fell off", so that she could have feet "as dainty as lotus buds" and walk "like a willow tree swaying" (Chin, 1993, 103). The Woman herself is later issued a list of what she cannot do with her body, starting with the first lesson, which is not to sit with her legs apart:

Cannot tend (bending forward, backwards)
Cannot bend

Cannot jump (jumping)
Cannot hump (making motions of copulation)

Cannot cut
Cannot strut (doing a flamboyant Black strut)

Cannot watch
Cannot scratch (scratching groin)

Cannot flub (falling down)
Cannot rub

Cannot start
Cannot fart (squatting as if to fart)

Cannot whinge
Cannot cringe

Cannot fly (making aeroplane motions, arms out)
Cannot cry
(Chin, 1993, 104-105)

More insidious is the brand of consciousness that such socialisation has instilled in her, a consciousness of norms and standards of physical beauty, and of the flagging self-esteem that arises from a failure to measure up to them. Two vignettes in Chin's piece exemplify this point. In one, an ordinary woman bemoans the fate of being flat-chested: "Every time I looked in the mirror and saw this chicken-breasted figure or walking down the street thinking about it, I felt deformed" (Chin, 1993, 109). In the other, a physician prescribes cosmetic surgery as a matter of course: "Do you like your mouth? For a mere princely sum you can have your mouth enlarged, thickened, lengthened, voluptuised, desensitised, defamilarised" (Chin, 1993, 110).

In most of the plays under study, a distinction is drawn between being a woman in the empirical sense and playing a woman as a result of sociocultural conditioning. Whereas delivering children is a biological act for women, nurturing children as one's maternal duty is a cultural imposition. The Woman in Ovidia Yu's aforementioned play sees "the ideal woman" as a cultural construct, something which she learnt at school. She refers to the Bible to bolster her point: "God made Man and he saw that it was not good for Man to be alone so God created Woman to be a companion to Man. That's what a Woman is supposed to be to a Man - a companion - not an extra beast of burden; not a toy for his sexual gratification; not an all-purpose-cook-cum-mother-cum-housekeeper..." (Yu, 1996, 25).The titular figure in Chin Woon Ping's Diary of a Mad Woman resists the social mandate to conform to what Relative 3 itemises as "antiquated laws derived from feudal notions, and unwritten rules, and restrictions, and stupid assumptions' (Chin, 1996, 356), as a result of which she is labelled "enigmatic", and condemned as deranged. But being beyond the pale actually brings forth a new perspicacity in her: she alone is aware of the pervasiveness of female surveillance as the patriarchal means of "conquering and controlling the other" (Chin, 1996, 370) even in the most innocuous of situations. This is in line with the idea that though women are often denied the status of narrative subjects in patriarchal discourses, their corporeal presence is emphasised through a focus on representation and sexuality. Peggy Phelan clarifies this link between female surveillance and male territoriality: "In excessively marking the boundaries of the woman's body in order to make it thoroughly visible, patriarchal culture subjects it to legal, artistic and psychic surveillance. This in turn reinforces the idea that she is her body" (Phelan, 1992).

This rendering of Woman as abject other to the male referent is the linchpin of much Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the principles of which are often subverted in recent Singapore plays with a feminist orientation. Freud's claim that a girl must give up clitoral stimulation for vaginal passivity is undercut by strong female characters who acknowledge their sexual urges, such as the Tua Soh in Leow's Family, who has trouble sleeping at night as a young widow, and the Mad Woman of Chin's second play, who is believed to gallivant and hang out at bars with the aim of picking up men. The latter, appropriately, refuses to see herself as a mere "receptacle" (resonant with sexual connotations) but elects to "bequeath [her] receptacle to posterity" (Chin, 1996, 384) as an ultimate act of defiance. Freud's other claim, that a woman reorients her sexuality away from her mother, her first and primary love-object, to her father, a male figure who can supply her with a penis, is subverted by the lesbian subjectivity in Eleanor Wong's two plays, Mergers and Accusations and Wills and Secessions. Wong's headstrong and intelligent heroines show that penis-envy is not innate but situational - only within the logic of heterosexuality. In seeking a female lover, the lesbian protagonist of Mergers usurps the Freudian sequence of male sexual awakening, where a boy's pleasure is deferred until he finds another woman to replace his mother as love-object. Ellen Toh can be read as engaging in a deferral of pleasure when she agrees to marry Jonathan Chin, before finally settling for Lesley Ryan, "a fantasy to fuck" (Wong, 1995, 57) when the opportunity presents itself. Ellen epitomises what feminist psychologist Adrienne Rich sees as the "original" and "potential" lesbian in every woman, since all women first love another woman in the form of her mother (Rich, 1976). The legacy of desire which a male child inherits and needs to resolve through heterosexual relations is, in the case of Ellen, transformed into a search for lesbian liaisons invested with the intensity and ambivalence of the mother-daughter bond. Interestingly, Wong parallels Lesley's imminent death with Ellen's mother recent demise to suggest that Ellen tries to get from Lesley what her own mother has denied her. Wong also parodies the Lacanian model by making Jonathan Chin the one with the maternal instinct. According to Lacan, a woman erases her lack through motherhood, with a baby as penis-substitute. However, Ellen is the quintessential careerist who nurses doubts about being a good mother. It is Jon who has a "baby fixation" (Wong, 1995, 29) and would willingly bear a few if he physically could. He even volunteers to be the homemaker, turning their social roles topsy-turvy:

Jon: I know. I'll quit [my legal career] to look after the baby.
Ellen: You'll wash and clean?
Jon: Like a demon.
Ellen: Change nappies?
Jon: Every hour on the hour.
Ellen: Buy the groceries.
Jon: With Sam strapped to my chest. Ellen: What about Celestina? Jon: Sam's gender neutral.
(Wong, 1995, 31)

As an ironic inversion of Lacan's model, Gerald is the one with the lack, the pre-Oedipal male who is aptly called a "man-child' (Wong, 1995, 29) by Ellen. If Wong manages to subvert the symbolic meanings that Lacan has conferred on the phallus, she also undermines Lacanian phallologocentricism by giving E1len the "biting tongue and smarting wit" (Wong, 1996, 157). If indeed "language is a means through which men have shored up their claim to a unified identity and relegated women to the negative pole of binary oppositions that justify masculine supremacy" (Jones, 1985, 80), then Ellen is clearly the usurper of language and by extension, of phallic authority. As the eloquent lawyer who can win herself more than litigation suits ("Please! When does Ellen stop talking?" asks her younger sister Grace (Wong, 1996, 139)), she is clearly the wielder of power, the one who articulates subjectivity within language. Conversely, it's Jon who is denied agency, who panders to and placates, and who becomes increasingly defensive as the play progresses. In Act One, one is already told that Ellen writhed under the presumptuousness of Lim while Jon was "hanging on to every word of his description" (Wong, 1995, 7). Not only does Jon lack Ellen's linguistic facility (even though he can craft each nuance of a complex legal document like an intricate musical score), he is finally shut out of the lesbian discourse governed by Ellen and Lesley at the end of the play. Instead of presenting women as conduits through which men cement their homosocial bonds vis-a-vis the kinship systems of Levi-Strauss, Mergers and Accusations makes Jon the sacrificial lamb in a homosexual rite of passage that Ellen has to undergo before she can accept the fact that a long-term commitment to another woman is possible. To see the play as merely re-enacting the male trajectory with simple role reversal is to overlook the fact that its female characters are no longer peripheral to the theme or serve as commodities of transaction between men.

3.) Returning the gaze: these strategies involve spectator manipulation with the aim of inverting subject and object positions. A key device is the lesbian polemic in the plays of Eleanor Wong which denaturalises the ideal spectator who is constructed by the dominant ideology as male and heterosexual and positioned to identify with the male protagonist. By creating a principal character who is gay and female and therefore 'doubly deviant', Wong's plays constitute a radical aesthetic defined by severance from essentialist gender categories and which belies heterosexual systems of signification. As a lesbian character who enters nonetheless into a temporary sexual relationship,with a man, Ellen Toh is a paradox which confounds all spectator expectations. Visibly a woman but more aggressive than her male counterpart (who is subsequently relegated to a role of domestic passivity), Ellen embodies "butch" and "femme" qualities within the same frame and articulates an exchange of desire between women. This allows the homosexuals in the audience to appropriate the subject position without being male-identified, but leaves the heterosexual spectator out in the cold. What Wong has done is use her unique terms of address to create a resistant critic/spectator, and in the process, achieve the following political objectives: to reveal that the feminist spectator is usually in an outsider position and forced to participate in the dramatic narrative from the hero's point of view; to avoid henceforth in subsuming the (feminist) spectator's individuality under the assumption of commonality but instead to destroy the gender-specific nature of theatrical representation.

At the textual level of her play, Mergers and Accusations, Wong has implicitly cautioned women against the dangers of internalising the patriarchal perspective. During her sojourn in the realm of mainstream heterosexuality, Ellen Toh can be interpreted as a male-identified heroine who assimilates patriarchal values only to discover that the refuge of heterosexual marriage is in reality a prison. She believes, for a brief wild season, that she can masquerade as the wife of a man but ends up victimising her own emotional life and dispossessing her body in the figurative sense. The varied personae and transitions of Ellen Toh, as gay best friend and then spouse of Jon's, and as lesbian lover of Lesley's, again reinforces the idea of gender as not a biological truth but as a field of experience, socially constructed, constantly changing. This idea is aligned to poststructuralist feminism whose ideal of sexual politics is for sexual difference to be transposed by a plurality of difference, where gender loses its position of primacy and is shown to be encoded and reproducible at will.

In the visual language of Wong's plays, females are no longer in subordinate positions as non-entities surrounding the nucleus of a male hero. Wills and Secessions, the sequel to Mergers and Accusations dispenses with male characters entirely. The action now revolves around the strained but enduring relationship between the sisters Ellen and Grace, and the tragic love between Ellen and Lesley, doomed to a premature end by Lesley's terminal illness. Vital among this play's repertoire of feminist devices is the way it subtly projects a second resisting reader, who is invited to engage in active dialogue rather than closed conversation with the text. Critics of the play who have failed to observe this strategy pan it for having a dampener of a denouement.. They see Ellen as receiving the short end of the stick and the play as faltering in its efforts to advance the homosexual cause. The death of Lesley, the lesbian lover for whom Ellen forsakes the approval of her family, seems to reaffirm dominant culture by functioning as the "problem" that needs to be purged by the end of the narrative for the reinstatement of conventional morality. And since the play adopts the genre of realist drama, which is generally postulated on some grand schema of social, moral or psychological causality, Lesley's cancer becomes loaded with moral implications and seemingly reinforces society's inclination to link disease and death, which then casts homosexuality in an unfavourable light. The play's closure with Lesley's death also appears to confirm the stereotyped notion of homosexuals coming to a bad end, particularly in this day and age when Aids is still regarded by many as a gay syndrome. Meanwhile, Ellen herself is stripped of financial resources and forced into a state of dependence by the end of the play. Whereas her sister Grace is allowed to follow her calling to Surabaya, Ellen is burdened with the unenviable task of caring for their aged father. The coup de grace has to be the fact that Grace gets to deliver the eulogy and therefore usurps the last words of the play. To all appearances, it would seem as if Ellen, the sexual outlaw-interloper who threatens the moral fabric of society gets her come-uppance as well as her defiant wings clipped.

But such a reading is only valid if we assume that Wong is addressing a uniformly sympathetic lesbian audience sensitive to the subtext and with a political axe to grind. But Such an audience would be difficult to conceive in staid Singapore. Rather, one can see Wong as constructing, simultaneously, a resisting reader and a compliant reader. Allowing the pious Grace to deliver the valediction, in which she appeals for some small measure of tolerance and compassion for the misunderstood lot of homosexuals, would certainly go down well with the conservative spectator, who would not be inclined to question Grace's credibility. At the same time, however, Wong rouses the liberal-minded in the audience into an awareness that much remains to be done. In the time-honoured tradition of Brecht, the spectator is expected to take his lesson from the theatre out into the larger society in order to overhaul it. Therefore, it is not merely a question of expanding the canon by focussing on feminist and other marginalised interests but actively exploding the canon by interrogating the underlying assumptions of an entire culture and its representation. Wong's plays have also been faulted for their realist mould which Sue Ellen Case calls a "prisonhouse of art for women" on account of its location within the domestic sphere and family unit and its usual reification of the male as sexual subject and the female as sexual other. But to peremptorily discard traditional realism is to neglect its power, possibilities and flexibility for depicting feminist issues. One can stretch the boundaries of mimetic drama to embrace feminist concerns as Eleanor Wong has done. Though realist in text and portrayal, Wong's second play is nonetheless given a symbolic mise-en-scene by Ong Keng Sen who uses an art installation consisting of over eight thousand glass bottles as the backdrop. The inclusion of a torch singer behind a huge grand piano placed at centrestage is another anti-mimetic device that provides a contrapuntal commentary on the dramatic action. While the play ends with Lesley's death and Grace's eulogy, the controversy of feelings surrounding Ellen's fate constitutes anti-closure of a sort.

Moreover, Wong may be said to have used the formal structures of realism to depict the female characters' entrapment in material conditions. Catherine Belsey has argued that realism could have in-built subversive tendencies, in exposing "incoherences, omissions, absences and transgressions" (Belsey, 1985, 56). The realist plays of Ibsen, for example, have been called conservatively anarchist in using realist principles to show the collapse of the bourgeois society which it depicts. If the accepted notion of "woman" is shifting , multiple and self-contradictory, then we certainly cannot dismiss realism as a viable form since identity would be fluid, and traced by a continuous interchange between the individual and the historical and cultural. Wong's simultaneous construction of two kinds of readers/spectators also endorses the idea of both men and women as subjects (an intersubjectivity), thereby transcending the classic binary opposition. Intersubjectivity entails freedom to be both "with" and distinct "from" the other, instead of merely seeking autonomy and separation from a hegemonic other by identifying with an opposing power.

4) Affirmative Actions: these are positive measures targeted at communicating a uniquely female experience and mode of expression rather than just taking to task the ramifications of male supremacy. First among these is the development of a new female scenic vocabulary which externalises the female interior experience and presents domestic settings in a mystical way. In contradistinction to patriarchal society, which is founded on the idea of separate and competing egos, is the absence of markers between the private and public in female experience, "related to the idea of women's body as permeable form whose boundaries expand and contract to take in or deliver other bodies or beings" (Lauter, 1984, 162). In Tan Mei Ching's Quiet the Gorilla, the mise-en-scene is occasionally washed in blue light to signify the exteriorisation of Siew's pathological states of mind. Her dream of the runaway circus is, in turn, a manifestation of the mental riot she needs to quell in order to achieve equilibrium. By having the gorilla literally appear on stage during Siew's moments of duress when she lacks mastery of her situation, Tan presents social and psychological conflicts as coexisting on the same scenographic space. Likewise, the empty stretch of road leading to nowhere, on which the three women are stranded in Lam's Ordinary Women, is symptomatic of lives void of purpose and direction, in the same way that the gap on the road symbolises a rupture in each woman's understanding owing to fear, anxiety or uncertainty.

Nowhere than the proposed set design for Chin's Diary of a Mad Woman is scenography more evident of the female capacity for combining the internal with the external or for lessening the artificial division between the emotional and the intellectual. Chin stipulates that the Mad Woman's scenes are to be played surrealistically, in contrast to the scenes involving the relatives, even though "towards the end of the play, the line between the two kinds of scenes start to blur as actors begin to switch roles" (Chin, 1996, 350), with the Niece finally inheriting the Mad Woman's mantle. Chin has also incorporated all manner of surrealistic images to denote the Mad Woman's paranoia: from frolicking lizards to talking cats and iguanas and dancing cellular phones. The nonlogical modulation of scenes from the prosaic and mundane to the dream-like and Dali-esque further suggests that "matriarchal art welds together thinking, feeling, doing" (Gottner-Abendroth, 1986, 82). The fact that most of these plays are set in domestic interiors redolent of women's culture also makes much of everyday objects and details. In Quiet the Gorilla, the proffering of chicken soup by Mrs. Lee, to the two siblings whom she considers her surrogate daughters, is a sign of affinity. The legacy of wisdom which the Mad Woman bequests on her Niece is contained in a diary and left in a microwave oven, an ironic twist to the popular image of Sylvia Plath's suicide. Thus, there is often a monumentalisation of the trivial and ordinary in these feminist plays.

Apart from functioning as the site for a whole spectrum of images, the feminist stage also uses design to stress connectedness between characters and their environments, as against the rigorous delineation of character in the patriarchal system. This is a cry of preference for gynocracy, which postulates a life-affirming unity between humans and everything around them, over andocracy, the male-centred, male-privileged system which promotes inequality through its orientation to power (Jenkins, 1995, 83-84). That the Mad Woman feels a kinship with the lower orders of mammals encapsulates the feminist rejection of hierarchical power structures. The lack of absolute distinction among the three unnamed women in Lam's play, and the emergence of the gorilla as emotional demon to Siew and Mrs. Lee in Tan's play, attest to the power of collective experience and non-subordinate affiliation. Women's communities, as these various plays suggest, are inclusive communities, akin to the manner in which physical and psychic barriers between actor and audience have been eliminated in the staging of most of these plays. Leow's Family is a Schechnerian kind Of environmental theatre. Chin's Details Cannot Body Wants is largely presentational rather than representational: the performer interacts with her audience at periodic intervals.

This idea of inclusion has implications on the style of these feminist plays. Even though there is no strictly definable, prescriptive format to feminist aesthetics, an alternative female canon is suggested by the characteristic mixture of styles and genres, forms and realities in these plays, which is like a collage or what Miriam Schapiro elsewhere calls "femmage" in reference to a metaphor of the patchwork quilt, richly eclectic yet curiously ordered by its overlying grid patterns ( Heller, 1987, 198). In all these plays, diverse experiences converge within the same frame to capture a colourful hybridity: past and present, reality and fantasy mingle freely on stage. The signature feature seems to be synthetic juxtapositions, what Sue Ellen otherwise terms "contiguity", a new feminine morphology concerned "not with clarity but with what's touched upon, working in-between" (Case, 1988, 129), 'in other words, finding significance in the interstices, deriving meaning from the space between similarities and contrasts - what things signify together and the variance they allude to. Meaning, subsequently, emerges from the collision of contexts, images, characters rather than from a sustained unravelling of plot. The emphasis is on open, ambiguous connections, stirring up possibilities for creative alliances in the mind of the reader-spectator. Ovidia Yu's play develops by a complex accretion of images intended for comparison and contrast: Noah's Ark "of dead timber" is juxtaposed to the "first tree on the first hill" (Yu, 1996, 18) where the woman is now taking refuge, to suggest the possibility of new beginnings. Chopping down this tree is at one and the same time, forsaking god's gift of a second chance after the deluge, wrecking the eco-system as well as the delicate balance between the sexes.

And in line with the idea that no singular image or style is prioritised is an avoidance of closure in the form of smug resolutions or pat endings. While most of these plays take the guise of the female bildungsroman, the dramatic thrust is not towards recognition but transformation and the narrative arc is circular rather than linear. Structurally, they break away from the trajectory of traditional drama that traces a path from conflict to cathartic resolution which mirrors the male sexual response from tumescence to orgasmic plateau and ejaculation (Reinhardt, 1981, 36-37). These plays are not pivoted on recognition scenes which seek and embrace "what is" but advocate transformation by asserting the possibility for change. If patriarchal scripts are indeed prisons to all women, the feminist playwright needs to rewrite their repressive paradigms. Making the female character inhabit multiple roles is Yu's way of suggesting that women have within them the resources to transform their lives. The female half of the mythic unicorn may have been killed early in the play but for every wife of Noah damned to domestic drudgery, there is a Nora with the eponymous potential of Ibsen's departing heroine and a Nu Wa whose androgynous origins equips her well as the creator of Man. The transformation in this play occurs when the stronger personalities in the woman gain prominence and she eventually snatches control of the conversation from the male narrator. Nonetheless, a circularity of structure is hinted at by the woman who recalls that "all this has happened before" (Yu, 1996, 35). The object lesson seems to be that if man is irreparable, the struggle between masculinity and femininity will continue, as reflected in the struggle between man and nature when trees are deracinated on a vast scale in the name of urban development.

In Chin's Diary of a Mad Woman, the transformation is a physical one as the Niece begins to assume the role of her aunt after gaining her perspective from reading her diary. Once again, there is no provision of a finite conclusion. The Mad Woman, in mounting the turtle, hints that the process of disseminating understanding is necessarily slow. She further states that she is "on the verge of knowing", that "the journey is not over" because she "will never arrive" (Chin, 1996, 392). The Niece, who will be perpetuating the aunt's campaign, will probably face the same ostracism; the process is an ongoing one. In the other plays, transformation comes in the form of reconciliation, whether it's Grace being reconciled to her sister's sexual preference, Siew's coming to terms with her pathological fears, or the three women in Lam's play being reconciled to the uncertainty of new challenges. However, these plays still offer no sense of closure. Woman 3 proposes to "try still to bring back the moon" (the "still" reverberates with echoes of timelessness) (Lam, 1996, 82) but whether they do succeed is anybody's guess. Min departs without the same degree of lucidity as her sister Siew or her neighbour Mrs. Lee because she remains the one who cannot see the gorilla. The female narrator of Chin's Details Cannot Body Wants will soon realise that the accumulating acquisitions defined by her various "wants" also contribute to the "details" that encumber her progress. All the things she craves and covets will add to the clutter of items to which she is chained when she comes crawling out at the beginning of the performance. The end may herald yet another beginning and a cyclical process is again suggested.

The apex of feminist development is the achievement of "fusion, fluidity, mutuality, continuity and lack of differentiation" (Hirsch, 1983) and the core of their moral calculus is an ethic of care rather than an ethic of justice. In Tan's play, Siew does not flinch from Mrs. Lee's violence because she recognises the latter's need to live vicariously through her. Her sister Min, operating the logic of justice, cannot understand that affection is contained in the violence. The aspiration to unity and continuity that galvanises the feminist enterprise is best conveyed by the woman's relationship with the tree in Yu's play. She believes that preserving trees is equivalent to planting one's own future. She also distinguishes between men's motive and women's motive in climbing trees: "A boy climbs a tree to conquer it. A girl climbs a tree to be part of it" (Yu, 1996, 35).

One detects, too, in these plays, a new textuality reminiscent perhaps of Kristeva rhythmic free-play or Irigaray's parIer femme, while not venturing as far as the radical feminists to say that this constitutes a superior counter-discourse. While mostly "materialist" in their approach, the Singapore women playwrights examined here do manifest a disavowal of plot like Cixous and evince a texture in their language which is sensuously tactile and punctuated with a proliferation of imagery, leitmotifs and verbal echoes. Chin's plays are particularly distinctive in their poetic, lyrical tenor. This is apparent in the longer monologues and set pieces:

"I know a place where the water convolvulus grows in dense clutches and jackfruit heavier than worry sit low on the branch. The banana leaf is smooth to touch, dollops of dew roll down its downy parts until you touch innermost recesses of flowering centre. There the spirit of banana tree lives, curled in crimson, pert as a virgin's nipple, a promise of golden form, great clumps of sweetnesses. The spirit is snowy, silent. He sidles into bed, he is sleek upon first caress, oh lighter than silk, muscularly made.

When her enters, you sigh several times with bliss, he hisses his wants into your ear, he loves to lick. The touch grows heavier as he strokes, he has many ways of lavishing attentions, now cool, now fiery, lapping at your sorest points, he is too cool, too tender, oh keep the rough handlings right there!
(Chin, 1993, 108)

Characteristic of what Cixous would regard as feminine textuality in the above excerpt is the florid, stream-of-consciousness style, with an abundance of metaphors elaborating rapidly into a highly ingenious sexual conceit. Also significant is the way Chin harnesses local myths and images: jackfruit, water convolvulus and the banana spirit are all indigenous to this region. Elsewhere, Chin's plays also demonstrate a hybrid of genres, styles as well as blends and fusions of these. Her play Details Cannot Body Wants mixes into one potent brew Indonesian pantouns, Black American Rap, advertising jargon, Christmas carols, Cantonese jingles, plus a range of allusions both Oriental and Occidental: Marlene Dietrich, the Japanese geisha, Billie Holiday, Shakespeare, Sutardji Calzoum Bachri, the Platters, Mae West and Edith Piaf. In her second play, the occasional lapses of the dialogue into verse, when the talking animals do their routine, are well-matched by the skilfulness of rhythmic word-play:

Lizards: Sometimes I feel like chucking it all.
Sometimes I feel like climbing the wall.
It's a never get ahead, work till you're dead world. Watch out for the fuzz, don't cause a buzz world.

Sometimes I feel like a social retard
Sometimes I feel like a stupid Red Guard
It's a lick and be posted to, strip and be poked into Fall and be kicked upon world.
(Chin, 1996, 377-378)

Inherent in the leitmotifs of several of these plays is a questioning of the extant symbolic order in mythology and the possible resurrection of an alternative pantheon. Luce Irigaray has explicitly cautioned against a myopic acceptance of the extant symbolic order: "It is very important to question again the foundations of our symbolic order in mythology and in tragedy, because they deal with a landscape which instils itself in the imagination and then all of a sudden becomes law. But that only means that it is an imaginary system that wins over another one. This victorious system is what we call the symbolic order" (Hoffman and Serrano, 1988, 159). Yu's reference to the legendary Nu Wa (set in ironic juxtaposition to Noah of the Judaeo-Christian cosmology) and Leow's implicit evocation of the female warriors of the Yang family in Chinese myth are such attempts at relocating to a matriarchal context. The recurrent references to the moon and its influence, in both Chin's work and Lam's work, serve to reinforce women's affinity with the elements and therefore, linking the idea of matriarchy with a sense of permanence, to be apprehended by humans in the plays as millennia of linear time.

Perhaps a re-invocation of the title of the anthology under study would be appropriate at this juncture, after the meticulous catalogue of feminist devices and strategies. Apart from the hermaphroditic associations in the Oriental concept of the phoenix is the idea of constant renewal represented by the phoenix as a universal motif of repeated resurrections. In the same vein, Singapore's women playwrights, as the playful phoenix of Singapore theatre in constantly teasing and extending the parameters of performance, also rise from the ashes as the veritable symbols of transcendance.

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