“Yo Mama so fat…!”

Reviewer: Andre Joseph Theng
Performance: 25 February 2014, 8pm

As I watched Pangdemonium!’s Fat Pig, I was reminded of a comic strip I used to read when I was younger – Cathy. A workaholic, a common theme of her womanly pains was her heft. She frequently tried to diet and exercise, but would always give in to temptation. When she tries to stop herself, it is too late and she can only lament her lack of willpower, resulting in an vicious cycle.

Just as Cathy is perpetually gorging on food, Helen (Frances Lee) is already seated on a long table and stuffing herself as one enters the DBS Arts Centre. In the background, Mika’s Big Girl you are Beautiful is playing softly, just loud enough to be discernable.

This nice touch by director Tracie Pang was quite promising. Unfortunately, despite many nice touches throughout the play, it never really climaxes. It is this that I feel prevents Pangdemonium!’s opening production for the season from being a great production.

Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig is a look into society’s notions of beauty. Tom (Gavin Yap) is forced to rethink his love for Helen when he realises that his friends and colleagues do not allow him to love Helen. It is his internal tensions that are at the heart of this play.
Despite being such a weighty topic, the actors in this play never need any gravitas. In fact it is the opposite – the humour is crass and tactless, and insensitivity is the rule of the day. This is best exemplified by Carter’s (Zachary Ibrahim) character – the good friend but one who is a little too honest as well. Completing the ensemble is Tom’s colleague Jeannie (Elizabeth Lazan), who has difficulty accepting the fact that Tom would choose Helen over her, a tall and slender, pulchritudinous lady.

There are many enjoyable bits throughout the play. The humour is intelligent and the jokes are not too corny. Newcomer Lee, a graduating Theatre student making her professional debut, is a delight to watch and has just the right amount of awkwardness with Yap, although their romantic scenes could use a little more chemistry. Look out for Tom’s between-scene costume change, a necessary function nicely turned into a joke of sorts as well as the antics of the stage hands who do a little more than carry props in and out.

Credit definitely must be given to the impressive set designed by Eucien Chia, which effortlessly transformed among others, into an office, a bedroom and even a beach. Stanislavsky would have been impressed with the automatically- swivelling office, which earned audible oohs from the audience.

That said, perhaps Pangdemonium! is in need of a new formula. Fat Pig seems to be banking on the successful formula of past Pangdemonium! productions, where a controversial topic is brought to the fore and made emotional. While it has delivered previously, for example in last year’s Rabbit Hole which I really enjoyed, Fat Pig was simply nowhere as visceral.

While the entire play was not a particular heavyweight in the bigger scheme of things, I am thankful that Pangdemonium! has brought this topic to the fore. We no longer blink an eye at the many weight loss ads in the newspapers, and the mass media continues to perpetuate unrealistic notions of beauty. One can only hope that one day those Yo Mama! jokes will no longer be funny, and that one can confidently say –

Yo Mama so fat!
That she is ……. beautiful.

“Fat Pig”

Reviewer: Walter Chan
Performance: 20 February 2014, 8pm

Have you ever exited the theater thinking, “WTF?!?”

Unfortunately that was my exact thought after watching Fat Pig, the latest offering from Pangdemonium Productions. Given the company’s solid choices of scripts over the years, Fat Pig seemed like a highly unusual misstep among past gems like Spring Awakening and Next To Normal.

But I guess if you’re hankering for some ang moh theatre, accents and all, and prepared to fork out at least $30, then this show is for you. No need to be ashamed though, Pangdemonium has built up a solid fan base thus far; you’re not alone.

Having said that, let’s cut to the chase here. Neil LaBute’s script, at first glance, offers a piece of biting social commentary that examines stereotypes and the forms of direct and indirect discrimination against fat people. Why is there a stigma attached to being fat? When did the word “fat” become an indictment of someone’s character anyway?

These questions make for great drama and Fat Pig did look the part, at least for the first scene anyway. Come to think of it, the first scene alone could have encapsulated the entire show. There was food (LOTS of food), a good dose of humor (involving all the synonyms for “big” that you can think of), and the feel-good factor of a romantic comedy.

It all went downhill from there, though.

The story kept constantly alternating between funny and tense moments, as if it couldn’t make up its mind on whether it wanted to be a romantic comedy or a serious drama. If the intended outcome of the laughs was to create a contrast to the serious moments, it backfired spectacularly: I couldn’t take the whole play seriously at all.

Never mind that we see more of Tom (Gavin Yap) than the titular protagonist Helen (Frances Lee), but the greatest flaw in the story comes from the characters themselves: The supporting characters of Carter (Zachary Ibrahim) and Jeannie (Elizabeth Lazan), together with Tom, come across as one-dimensional and irritatingly childish at times.

The perpetually indecisive Tom never evolves beyond the paradoxical paradigm of the emasculated Casanova (more emasculated than Casanova). His colleagues at work, Carter and Jeannie, come across as incredibly bullish yet incredibly self-centred, seeming to only be interested in making Tom’s life a living hell. And to top it all off, just when I thought that the (already stagnating) plot was about to reach its climax, the house lights came on and the cast came back onstage to take their bows.

Cue “WTF?!?”

I don’t know whether the problem was that LaBute’s script grew too stodgy towards the latter half, or if the American context (accents included) felt too artificial in the local context, or if it was the rather ambiguous ending, or a combination of all these factors

But let me make one thing abundantly clear (see what I’m doing here?): an ending that is open-ended is not equivalent to an ending without any closure. Yes, this is social commentary. Yes, you want to provoke a reaction from the audience. Yes, you want them to ask questions.

But not the wrong kind.

Like “WTF?!?”