FRAYED ENDS | by Michelle Tan

Synopsis

Frayed Ends charts how the lives of a close circle of friends carry on after one of them decides to end her own life. In the face of a loss that is both immeasurable and sudden, they struggle with the frustrating limits of being human, of trying (and failing) to be there for the ones they love, and with finding some kind of hope even in the inevitability of these failures.

Artist’s Statement/Inquiry

At this stage the work is a two-fold attempt at the following:

• To explore the specific dynamic of loss among a group of friends who are as close as family – what does this journey look like for people not held together by blood or romantic relations? If the blunt force of grief can fracture even familial ties, what impact might it have on an ostensibly more tenuous connection?
• To lay bare/make sense of the writing process; a small experiment in exploring how stories are constructed, and what distance (if any) lies between craft and creation, or between real life and what passes for fiction on stage. If the narrative is about the attempt to cross the divide between where one is (for instance, in mourning/alive and in pain) to where one would like to be (for instance, somewhere closer to okayness/away from present suffering), then to see this embodied in the text would be to see how the play itself also journeys from unwritten and inarticulate to become, hopefully, a thing that says something of some comfort and value.

Michelle Tan – Playwright

Michelle is a writer and drama educator. As a playwright her work has been produced by several local theatre companies, including Cake Theatrical Productions and Singapore Repertory Theatre. Her last play, I Am Trying To Say Something True, was commissioned as part of the Esplanade Studios 2018 season. Currently Michelle teaches in the theatre department at the School of the Arts.

Ellison Tan Yuyang – Performer

Ellison Tan Yuyang graduated from the National University of Singapore with a major in Theatre Studies. She has trained with ECNAD, Cake Theatrical Productions, The Finger Players and Nine Years Theatre. She is an actor, writer and theatre-maker.

Notable performances include: I Am Trying To Say Something True ( Esplanade Studios), Art Studio (Nine Years Theatre), Café (Twenty-something Theatre Festival), Manifesto (The Necessary Stage and Drama Box), Off Centre (The Finger Players (2015) and The Necessary Stage(2019)), and Temple Reconstructed (Cake Theatrical Productions). Play-writing works include: The Dragon’s Dentist (Esplanade’s PLAYtime!) and Inheritance (The Finger Players).

In 2015, Ellison was accepted into the Next Generation Program in Tokyo, a three-year program that aims to grow emerging artists specifically in the field of Theatre for Young Audiences. She co-founded The Wanderlings – a collective that created Singapore’s first baby theatre production.

Ellison is the Co-Artistic Director of The Finger Players.

Ethel Yap – Performer

Ethel is an alumnus of NUS Theatre Studies (2011) and London’s Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (Masters in Musical Theatre, 2012). Her recent stage credits include Yellow Chair Productions’ The Last Five Years, W!LD RICE’s Jack and the Beansprout, Toy Factory’s Romeo and Juliet, Our Company’s Dear Nora, I Theatre’s Hop and Honk, TNS’ Untitled Women, Pangdemonium’s Tribes and Urinetown, Dick Lee’s Beauty World and The Theatre Practice’s If There’re Seasons, Liao Zhai Rocks! , Lao Jiu: The Musical and Four Horse Road, and Glowtape’s The Great Wall: One Woman’s Journey. Her tv and film credits include OKTO’s After School, Channel 5’s Code of Law, and feature film Our Sister Mambo.

Ethel is also a singer-songwriter, releasing her debut self-titled EP in late 2017 and a single, “Like”, in 2018. You can listen to her music at http://radi.al/EthelYapEP and find out more about her work at www.ethelyap.com.

Gloria Tan – Performer

Gloria began her career as a teenager, receiving quality training from NYAS, New York Acting School, Singapore, before moving swiftly on to NAFA, where she graduated with a 3-year Diploma in Acting. Invested in culture and country, Gloria joined the Malay community to explore a change of culture and language. She immersed herself wholly into the community, eventually leading to a L!fe Theatre Award for Best Ensemble for Bilik/Ahmad.

Turning her talents to the screen, Gloria appeared in multiple television programmes including BFF, Nora Wedding Concepts, Rempuh, Show Malam Ini (Seasons 1 & 2) Kecoh-Kecoh Ramadan and Ikhlas, as well as acting in her first ever international movie, BANTING (2014).

In 2016, she performed her celebrated, sold out, one woman show at the Esplanade Studio, as part of the M1 Fringe Festival, entitled Kancil: The Chronicles of One & Zero, after which she was commissioned by Channel News Asia to devise a performance piece, targeted at youths, based on depression, which premiered in March 2016, entitled, My Name is Jamie.

Expanding her repertoire and reach, Gloria has been working closely with Japan’s Gumbo Theatre, a critically acclaimed theatre company for the past five years performing in and around Japan. In 2017, Gloria moved her work to Indonesia, working with Singapore’s The Necessary Stage for the sold out showing of Untitled Cow Number 1.

Sindhura Kalidas – Performer

Sindhura Kalidas is a graduate of the NUS Theatre Studies programme. Since her graduation, she has worked with a number of theatre companies and was last seen in the 2019 re-staging of Off Centre by TNS and Ellison Tan’s We Were So Hopeful Then, a new play produced under TNS’s developmental platform The Orange Production. Sindhu is glad to be back at C42 after being part of a dramatised reading of Zee Wong’s The Women Before Me at 2019’s Late Night Texting.

Suhaili Safari – Performer

Suhaili Safari has worked professionally as a theatre practitioner since 2003.

Although largely a stage actor, Suhaili has dabbled in writing and/or directing in productions such as The Kingdom Under My Bed (2010), a children’s play under Teater Ekamatra and Move, As We Move (2017) under Kaizen MD. She actively involves herself in community partnership, and does this through outreach endeavours with Sweet Tooth by Cake Theatrical Productions and Drama Box for Both Sides, Now. Her recent work includes The Clockwork Orange (2019, Teater Ekamatra), Tanah°Air (2019, Dramabox) and Inside Voices (2019, Lazy Native) which won Best Outstanding Work at the annual Vaults Festival in London.

Suhaili is creating solo work beginning with The Cleanse, developing it specifically as part of The Substation’s ‘State of Love and Trust and Stars’ programme this year.