Alfian Sa’at’s finale to his Asian Boys trilogy promises to be a peculiar affair. Edward Choy finds out if it’s just a little queer

Alfian Sa’at’s latest play is Happy Endings: Asian Boys Vol. 3, and even if you haven’t watched either of the first two instalments of the trilogy, the title should give you some clue as to its content. But if you were hoping that the resident playwright for Wild Rice was going to deliver a sexploitative soft-porn homosexual show, you will be disappointed. All it promises is a nuanced and layered character study of individuals coping with life.

Alfian, I have to admit I used to be really homophobic.

Well, I don’t really blame you. There are many people in the gay community who step over the line sometimes, and when a guy is straight, like you are, you’re obviously out-of-bounds, but they still insist on trying.

Wow, that’s a pretty enlightened attitude. What about the religious right and their conflicts with the gay community?

I think we have to be careful not to import some of this discourse, because there are people who think that places like the U.S. have really reached a point where it’s too late to turn back. Therefore, Singapore must guard against this slippery slope. The rise of the evangelical movement here means we’re getting a lot of their teachings, but we have to be careful not to import the battles they’re fighting over there, too – simply because we don’t share the same contexts. We’re not even broaching gay marriage here in Singapore, we’re talking about decriminalisation.

We’ve had all this talk in the media recently about it, so what is your opinion on the average Singaporean’s attitude towards gay people?

Singapore’s not very much different from a lot of countries. Locals mostly turn a blind eye as long as [homosexuals] keep to themselves and stay out of their way. So I really don’t know what all this fuss is about. Some very conservative people are of course directing their energies towards gay people, as if the latter are going to bring about the world’s ruin. I mean, come on. I think a lot of good would come about if they re-focused on something that will eventually cause actual destruction, like climate change.

How about MM Lee’s comments about homosexuality? They were quite positive.

Well, MM has also said in the past that his comments are really his own, and the final say on policy still comes from the current batch of ministers. But MM knows that Singapore needs to be seen as open and tolerant at this critical point when we need to attract foreign talent, and pragmatism says we can’t be wasting valuable human resources just because they’re gay.

You’ve got this play, and it’s gay, but it’s not going to be sexploitative, right? I see Ben Xiao sitting naked in front of a book on your promotional materials.

Yeah, it’s quite distracting. But no, it’s not that kind of play. I mean, Asian Boys Vol. 1 was this camp play with a crazy plot about a goddess coming to Earth to save men from becoming gay, going back in history to like the coolie quarters, and the conclusion was really that this was ridiculous – you can’t trace homosexuality to a single point, or try to save them from it. Vol. 2 was quite different; it was a bunch of short plays about locations where gay people existed in Singapore, and the presentation style was also different. It was full-on psychological realism, and watching it made for a completely different experience.

So now we’ve got Vol. 3…

Yeah, we’ve had History and Geography so far, so we’re left with?

Erm. Oh, Literature!

Right! Vol. 3 is about Literature. You see we’ve got this form and theme thing going: Vol. 1 was Camp/History, Vol. 2 was Naturalistic/Geography and Vol. 3 is Docu-drama/Literature. You have the first half of the play with the characters in junior college, and the second half is 15 years later with the same characters but played by a completely different set of actors. It’s not really so much a gay play as it is a play about people growing up, moving on and letting go. A play about how much the past holds us in its grip and how we determine our future.

What about Peculiar Chris, the text that your play is based on?

Peculiar Chris was Singapore’s first gay novel, and it was written by a young gay man named Johann S. Lee. He was only 19 when he wrote it during National Service. He wanted to write something that would cast gay people in a positive light and talk about what it was like to be gay. It’s really special to me because it was the first gay literature I read. But the thing about the book is that it’s not like some of the gay literature you have today. There were no explicit sex scenes and it was very reticent, almost painfully so. It’s like it would come to the moment – then it would skip forward, and you were left to imagine what happened for yourself.

How faithful is your play to the text?

Quite faithful. I’ve tried to respect the author’s intentions as far as possible. You won’t be seeing anything explicitly sexual, for example.

How different is it?

A novel can afford to have long pieces of dialogue, because of what it is. But a play is driven more by action, so I’ve had to make some parts of the dialogue more compact. I’ve also chosen to flesh out characters that were peripheral in the novel, like this old man who frightened off the protagonist because he represented the latter’s fears of ageing.

So is this the last play then?

Yeah, it’s my last gay play.

You mean the last play in this gay trilogy?

No, I mean it’s my last gay play. My mother asked me about this play, and I told her the title was Happy Endings. Her next question was, ‘Is it gay?’ I said yeah, but I told her it’s my last one. I think I’ve said all I want to say on the subject.

Just out of curiosity, how are you going to sell this play to straight men?

That’s why the play has two titles. You can tell your friends you’ll be watching Happy Endings. And you can tell them all the gay people get AIDS and die in the end. I told my mother that, and she said, ‘Oh, that’s good’. But I’m convinced that when she does watch it, she won’t bear to have anyone die. She’ll be so invested in the characters’ stories and will desperately want their stories to continue even after the play ends. And, of course, nobody dies, the ending is happy, in spite of everything, although it’s a fragile kind of happiness. But which kind of happiness isn’t?