Playwriting

Dive (2024)

The Studio @ Wild Rice, Singapore

Directed by Sim Yang Ying (‘YY’)

Dramaturgy by Joel Tan

Performed by Ebi Shankara, Irsyad Dawood, Ellison Tan, and Jean Ng.

Set & Lighting Designer Elizabeth Mak
Sound Designer Guo Ningru
Multimedia Designer NONFORM
Costume Designer Sim Yan Ying “YY”
Make-Up Designer Bobbie Ng
Hair Designer Ashley Lim

Clement Wong, Straits Times, ‘Smartly directed Dive plunges head-first into an abusive relationship’

‘Two characters multiplied into four voices, they give a multi-perspective depth to the couple’s interactions and conflicts. Their voices commingle: sometimes two people act out a character’s facade and subconscious at the same time, or a character’s present morose sulking and his recent stalking violence.

It sounds confusing – and in the beginning, the role-switching requires close attention. But it is a mechanism that also lends a freshness and theatricality to an ultimately linear story, the different combinations of actors helping the audience visualise love in all forms and giving their exchanges a universality’.

‘Hers is writing that is comfortable with poetic dreamscape interludes, which Sim interprets with some effective contemporary dance movements, including a loving tussle that proves just a turn away from disaster’.

Phillipe Pang. Review: Dear Dive (Dive, written by Laura Hayes, directed by Sim Yan Ying “YY”)

‘As a complex amalgamation of two lives, intertwined like fizzy, electrical currents that buzz and short-circuit whoever or whatever is in contact with it (coincidentally, also a sound effect that pervades the story), you gave me the greatest gift — but also the greatest curse — an audience member could have in watching a play: reflecting the reality of my life back at me’.

‘As I watched the story of love and hurt — for they are, as I have always believed, two sides of the same coin — play out in your re-telling, I more often than not wrote down questions, and question marks, in my notebook than actual “review-worthy” observations’.

‘Language is the means by which we both reach out to others, and how we are perceived, and the emphasis of the “near” not “at” at once reveals to us the duplicitous nature of the younger lover’s diction — how they desperately try to convince themselves that, they didn’t mean it. In these small, seemingly insignificant choices of diction, Hayes’ writing shines’.

Photographs by Ruey Loon

Hide and Seek (2023)

An audio play, written as part of Waterloo Street Stories and the Singapore Night Festival (2023). Produced by Centre 42 and Artwave Studio.

Director: Cherilyn Woo
Actors: Benjamin Chow, Isabella Chiam, Timothy Wan, Masturah Oli, Shanjeevi Ganesan, Cheryl Ho

You can listen to it here.

Provenance (2018)

Drama Centre Black Box, Singapore

Written by Laura Hayes and created by Autopoetics

Performed by Chelsea Crothers, Laura Hayes, and Maiya Murphy

Stage Management by Jovetta Tan

Provenance was performed 26 – 27 October 2018 at the Drama Centre Black Box in Singapore, National Library Building, 100 Victoria St, Singapore 188064.

“What stories can an assemblage of objects tell, all these “nameless, shapeless things?” Rarely has an invisible landscape felt so visible, so tangible to me.”

“There was something so precise about the way the interlocking stories of these three women were pieced together, almost as if you were sculpting your own object, chiselling it out of the darkness and out of our collective imaginations. At first I mistook this choreographed precision for detachment, but then I realised you were excavating something incredibly fragile and tender from underneath it all, the way a surgeon might cut through a sheath of skin to get to that quivering, wet-slicked organ beneath.”

Corrie Tan, https://theintimatecritic.home.blog/2018/11/19/the-journey-begins/

“The performance itself was tightly wrought and snappily delivered right from the opening scene”.

Marc Nair, http://www.mackerel.life/from-where-we-came-a-review-of-provenance

”Well-paced, succinct and performed with strength and clarity both in body and enunciation, Provenance is a remarkable first outing for Autopoetics that hits all the right notes and marks this collective as one to continue looking out for.”

Bakchormeeboy, https://bakchormeeboy.com/2018/11/05/review-provenance-by-autopoetics/

Provenance explores the value we give to things and the connection between art, beauty, relationships, and commerce. If a piece of art is beautiful or desirable, should that change be dependent on where it comes from? How does where we come from as people shape the way we live in the world? What happens if the balance in our relationships with people and with things tilts too far in one direction?

Provenance is also an experiment in devising techniques, based the idea of a “(play)box,” a creation born from the processes of devising. Carefully curated with pieces of original text, props, objects, prompts, and devising provocations, a (play)box is literally a box of stuff – a material provocation to make a play that takes the place of a traditional script.