Toilet-Urgent Fever Dream

Or: Shao on his inspiration behind the hilarious play Caller Unknown in the 2019 Internal Productions

First Published on NUSSync, NUS Stage

Reproduced here without permission because I’m the author

I remember this idea’s conception very clearly.

I was sitting in the middle middle-aisle seat, sleep-deprived, needing to pee but unwilling to disturb the gruff-looking Korean man to my left or the eager young man to my right for the third time that flight. He was halfway through one of the Bourne movies, one of those that was constantly on loop on AXN.

Through this strange meeting of archetypes, my inability to leave my seat and a Bourne movie which I was very familiar with, I then explored the idea of metaphorical social immovability in order to distract myself from the bottom rung of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

How would one imagine to get rich quick?
What kind of illegitimate means could we explore to get rich quick?
What if the scammer was Singaporean?
Why aren’t Singaporean kidnapping scam artists a thing? and
Is he at the last scene of the Bourne Ultimatum?

In every piece of writing you engage in, there’s an element of yourself in every character, like it or not; you can say there’s always a bit of a monologue inside every play, a monologue from the playwright themselves. When writing the characters, I didn’t realise how much Ma in my play was like my own mother until I reread it again a few months back; she was a little guilt-trippish but ultimately caring. The stern Korean man became Mr Chan, while the eager young man became Jason. And everyone in the story got a piece of me.

Jason, the indignant son of Ma, is spineless, easily persuaded and points out how everything is insane.
Anthony became my outlet for pop culture quips and my frustration with too much Bourne.
Nathaniel, who directed the play, made me play the paper-thin antagonist, Mr. Chan.

In the heart of it all, playwriting is a mechanism for me to explore a shower-thought in a more excessive extent than through conversations in real life. It is a way to acknowledge my ability to tell a story in a format which others can enjoy. I plan to write a lot more, of course; Caller Unknown was written in a way more suited for TV and was quite hand-wavey in terms of logic, but I’m still immensely glad that it was directed and acted by Stage members who had so much fun bringing my red-eye-flight, toilet-urgent fever dream to life.