Eight Plays

Playwright Omnibus Series

by Ovidia Yu

Fall in love with Singapore's most prominent feminist playwright. Ovidia Yu dissects all things female—from breasts to virginity, motherhood to lesbian love—and lays them bare in this omnibus collection of her finest works, including The Woman in a Tree on the Hill, the only Singapore play to win the Edinburgh Fringe First award.

Reviews:
On The Woman in a Tree on the Hill
“This production’s strength is…in the details. Touching and very brilliant.”
—Jeremy Samuel, The Flying Inkpot

On Three Fat Virgins
“Ovidia Yu’s light and witty comedy is (juxtaposed with) dark undercurrents of frustration, claustrophobia and hopelessness…”
—Kenneth Kwok, The Flying Inkpot

On Hitting (On) Women
“...a well-crafted play that gives an intimate examination of the knotted, entangled lives of two women.”
—The Business Times

Genres: Plays, Queer, Fiction, Theatre

416 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2011

Reviews

[Amy ☁️ (tinycl0ud) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful collection of eight plays (produced between 1992-2007) by my favourite local playwright. She focuses on the female experience, and her characters are unmistakably local but simultaneously universal. She mythologises; she elevates the mundane. There is nothing she doesn’t tackle and she makes you laugh while she does it. I saw glimpses of myself and people I know. This is just one of those books that you read and you think: ah, she really gets it. She really hit the nail on the head. This is how I feel and she put it into words!!

The world(s) in Yu’s plays can be bleak, but there is an inner strength that plays through (haha) till the end. Ultimately, her stories affirm — she makes you feel seen and she gives you hope. I adore these closing lines from “Life Choices”:

“Not every bud gets to become a showcase blossom. But you have to remember to be a plant, not a flower. And when things get difficult, you hang on and adapt till you can bloom again. You still may not find yourself holding the flowers you were brought up to expect, but each blossom is special in its own way. And every bud in your life is precious.”

[nkp · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a random book I picked up from Davis library. Some plays were better than others, but this collecting didn’t do it for me unfortunately. I was jazzed initially about the strong focus on motherhood/ womanhood and life in Singapore. I didn’t know much about Singapore at all, but I was very taken by the “pan-Asian” setting. Really cool to see references to Chinese culture right up against a reference to Indian food. Growing up in India was a largely homogeneous experience, and any outside influence was often subtle or not even noticeable in everyday life. Super interesting stuff.

The Woman Themes were so close to being coherent but ended up missing the mark. Very second wave feminism, really weird takes on abortion and agency. The staging and characters were not very clear, but that I think was by design and I’m just a little dumb in the head. Need 2 read more plays in general.

[Leia Deva · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Woman in a Tree on a Hill, Three Fat Virgins, and The Silence of Kittens were fantastic! I love how the multiplicity of womanhood is reflected in the distribution of parts themselves: the women are interchangeable, assuming different identities, often standing in for one another, and juggling 5 or more parts among themselves; in the process they self-reflexively invert, embody and question the categories they (females) are often unforgivably slotted into, just as how Yu herself allows the cultural elision of women and nature a central place in her plays - only beginning from the conventional premise does she start her line of questioning.