Everybody’s an expert on education. Everybody’s started a sentence with, “Last time when I was in school…” at least once. And everybody – come on, admit it – everybody’s had moments where they felt someone else hadn’t been taught properly in school.

What would it be like, then, to step into the shoes of an educator? How do the people, whose job it is to teach our children, manage to uphold the standards that are set upon them – by society and by themselves? We are experts on our own education – should we also consider ourselves experts on educators?

Using material gleaned from interviews with a wide range of teachers – primary to secondary, in-service to retired, elite independent schools to neighbourhood institutions – Micromanage Overwork Exasperate (M.O.E.) seeks to explore the unspoken sides of education, and give voice to the true experiences, struggles and successes of some of our nation’s most invisible heroes – our teachers.

Micromanage Overwork Exasperate (M.O.E.) is based on interviews done with teachers regarding their teaching experiences in the Singapore education system. It will be staged in September 2016 by the theatre collective Dark Matter Theatrics, which aims to engage people from all walks of life with honest and impactful storytelling. The collective consists of playwright-director Christopher Fok, actor Lian Sutton and playwright Marcia Vanderstraaten. When they aren’t working together on plays they love, they are variously engaged in library work, report writing and drinking beer.

M.O.E. is a reworking of an earlier play written in 2014 on the same topic, called Micromanage Overwork Exaggerate. It is not considered a ‘restaging’, because about half of it is new material, based on new interviews and developments in the education scene. The process through which the new scenes will be written is directly connected to the physical spaces of Centre 42. It does, however, use most of the 2014 script, albeit in a different sequence. The scenes are roughly divided into

1. monologues, and
2. hyper-real imaginings of situations which teachers face regularly.

M.O.E. will be staged using the physical spaces of Centre 42, and not simply a black box as per the 2014 production; for this new script the collective is looking at a more site-specific experience, and how the physical spaces can be incorporated into the script.

Playwright – Marcia Vanderstraaten

Director – Christopher Fok and Marcia Vanderstraaten

Performers
Jo Tan
Edward Choy
Shafiqah Efandi
Vignesh Singh