PISTACHIOS AND WHIPPED CREAM | by A Yagnya

Theresa Tan in 1987. Theodora, better known as Theo, has been living alone in her university hostel. One day, a girl named Sandra dressed all in yellow, moves in. Their personalities and family backgrounds are worlds apart, resulting in their differing perceptions about the world they share. With a healthy dose of varsity dramas, boys, and an “unflushable poop”, this play tells the journey of two ladies who managed to come to some degree of mutual understanding of each other.

Directorial Vision:
When A Yagnya first read Pistachios and Whipped Cream, the images that flashed through her mind were possibly not at all intended by the playwright when Tan first wrote the play in 1987. In her investigation and interpretation of this text, A Yagnya wishes to explore how the existing stereotype of foreigners in Singapore can be made better. Her adaptation seeks to portray the character of Sandra as a Chinese national and Theo as a Singaporean, thus giving rise to a set of different personal interactions between the characters. By working with the comedy present in Tan’s text, she hopes to achieve a work that questions its audience subtly on their views without being preachy.

Presenting this 1st phase of the exploration as a dramatized reading incorporating some basic multimedia and physical theatre work will allow her to crystalise her vision for the full work. The process will help her develop a conscious style for text based direction, through written reflections and documentation of the process.

A Yagnya aims to develop Pistachios and Whipped Cream into a full staging.

A Yagnya, Director
Yagnya is a director who has worked on various capacities with The Necessary Stage (Mobile II: Flat Cities), TheatreWorks (Of Babies [not really] and People), The Singapore Repertory Theatre (Chicken Little and The Nightingale) and the M1 Fringe Festival on theatre projects.

Yagnya aims to develop works for a non-theatre going audience to further discussions about societal issues in a way that she strongly believes theatre can achieve, through compelling stories. When she’s not doing theatre work, Yagnya studies Japanese and does translation and interpretation for the arts. She enjoys a good chat and good tea after shows.

Theresa Tan, Playwright
Theresa Tan’s foray into playwriting began after her first year at university when she decided to participate in the Shell-NUS National Short Play Competition 1987. She did not expect her play Pistachios And Whipped Cream to win First Prize—a win that opened up to her the world of theatre. Theresa went on to become one of the dramatists in TheatreWorks’ seminal Writers’ Lab, which culminated in the Theatre On The Hill event in 1992, a “carnival” of short plays penned by Singaporean playwrights.

Theresa’s Bra Sizes was staged at this event. Her first full-length play Dirty Laundry was staged by TheatreWorks in 1993. In 1994, Theresa collaborated with director Alvin Tan of The Necessary Stage to workshop and stage Excuse Me While I Kiss The Sky, a work that featured the true stories of young people who had attempted suicide.

Since then, Theresa has not written plays except for her church’s Easter and Christmas events. She got married in 1995, became the editor at a host of magazines, from Female Singapore to ELLE Singapore to Tiger Tales to Vanilla, and now runs her own commercial writing business, WORD Agency. She is also the author of A Clean Breast, a chronicle of her experience with breast cancer in 2010. She is married with three children, 19, 17 and 12.

Mentor
Alvin Tan

Multimedia
Brian Gothong Tan

Performers
Rebekah Sangeetha Dorai
Cheryl Tan Yun Xin
Ruzaini Mazani