2023
“A couple’s heart-rending exercise in letting go."
- The Straits Times
All photos by Joseph Nair, and courtesy of Checkpoint Theatre.
On our first day of rehearsals for this run, our director Huzir Sulaiman asked us a question that went something like
How are you? As artists. As people.
How are your lives, your work, your marriages?
What’s changed for you these past 2 years?
Turns out, quite a lot!
I don’t think any of us realised how much additional anxiety we’d been carrying in the 2021 run.
We first staged this play in December 2021.
We were still dealing with safe management measures - our reduced audience capacity was only 25 seats per show.
We sold out - which was great - but it still felt pretty strange to be playing to a “full house” of 25 people, fully-masked, spaced 2 metres apart.
Also, we were showing up to work each day wondering if anyone had fallen sick.
And whether we would have a show.
All in all, pretty stressful!
So for this run in 2023,
I’m glad to be able to report that Jo and I were both in much better places, mentally and emotionally.
We’d both been crazy busy - it felt like the creative industries had been playing post-Covid-catch-up in 2023.
But we were grateful for the work.
Session Zero was my last play for the year.
The culmination of a whirlwind, non-stop 6 months of theatre - Hotel, G*d Is A Woman, then this.
So I was tired.
But thoroughly enjoyed being able to revisit this work.
We found new things.
We deepened our understanding of our characters, and their relationships.
I fell in love with the script again.
It remains one of my all-time favourite original Singapore works.
And we sold out again!
This time to houses of about 100+ audience members each show, seated side-by-side, able to laugh, and cry, and dream with us.
That felt pretty great! :)
2021
“A collaborative act of imagination."
- The Straits Times
Session Zero was my first time back on stage since the pandemic.
The first time I played Dungeons & Dragons was in secondary school, probably around 1992.
It blows my mind that my nerdiest hobby from 30 years ago is now the subject of a beautiful, heartrendingly personal play by my dear friend and colleague Jo Tan.
Jo wrote it, she and I performed it, Huzir Sulaiman dramaturged and directed it, and Checkpoint Theatre staged it in December 2021.
We performed 19 shows, each seen by 25 socially-distanced audience members, in the tiny black box space at 42 Waterloo St.
All rehearsal photos are by Jayne Lim and courtesy of Checkpoint Theatre.
When our director Huzir Sulaiman joined us at curtain call on opening night, he shared this fact:
Session Zero marks Checkpoint Theatre’s return to live performance after 21 months of postponements, cancellations, and pandemic-related upheaval.
I remember being very moved. To have been trusted - by Huzir, by Checkpoint, and by Jo - with this responsibility.
In her playwright’s message (read it, it’s great), Jo wrote about how Dungeons & Dragons brought some comfort during the pandemic:
“Escaping to fantasy worlds kept me sane. I got to be somewhere else, and someone else.”
I had a very similar experience.
When theatres were closing, and acting (and acting-adjacent work) dried up overnight, it was really good to have something else to focus on. Shows like Critical Role, and having a weekly D&D game, did a lot for my mental heath. D&D was something to look forward to, invest in, care about.
I cannot overstate the benefits of recreational imagination.
Photo by Crispian Chan, courtesy of Checkpoint Theatre.
Photo by Joel Lim, courtesy of Checkpoint Theatre.
Photo by Crispian Chan, courtesy of Checkpoint Theatre.
Photo by Joel Lim, courtesy of Checkpoint Theatre.
Photo by Crispian Chan, courtesy of Checkpoint Theatre.
Photo by Crispian Chan, courtesy of Checkpoint Theatre.
Photo by Crispian Chan, courtesy of Checkpoint Theatre.
Photo by Crispian Chan, courtesy of Checkpoint Theatre.
Photo by Joel Lim, courtesy of Checkpoint Theatre.