Pesta Raya: Restaging of Potong a chance to re-examine issues like cross-dressing, caregiving work
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Potong by Teater Ekamatra stars (clockwise from top) Irsyad Dawood, Aisyah Aziz, Farah Ong and Jada.
PHOTO: AKBAR SYADIQ
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SINGAPORE – After playwright Johnny Jon Jon’s Potong was staged in 2018, a Chinese audience member started a WhatsApp group with Jon Jon and her son to discuss circumcision.
“It was really awkward for me to be talking about this with a 13-year-old I didn’t know,” says Jon Jon, whose Potong is the third of an unintentional trilogy. “The whole circumcision aspect was what people might call button-pushing. It got people excited to talk about such things.”
Potong – about Adam, an Australia-born Malay-Muslim Singaporean whose mother forces him to return to Singapore for national service – is a crowd-pleaser, filled with risque puns and gender-bending.
Beneath the laughs is a heartfelt play about family. When it was first staged in 2018 by minority theatre company Teater Ekamatra, audiences found it a nuanced exploration of the meaning of acceptance, rites of passages and the pain of caregivers whose sacrifices often go unseen.
Jon Jon, 35, says of the sold-out 2018 show: “The response I got when I attended all these – I could hear pockets of people crying, people gasping. It made me feel there was space for us to talk about very serious issues in a medium that is not so serious.”
Director Mohd Fared Jainal, who played Adam’s transgender uncle Saleh in 2018, adds that the issue of cross-dressing on stage is a particularly sensitive one.
In Teater Ekamatra’s restaging at Pesta Raya – Malay Festival of Arts, Saleh will be played by transgender actor Jada.
Fared, 49, says: “We thought now was the time to stage it again. Given the current landscape, things have changed. Are we ready to deal with this on a performance platform? As a theatre company, it is our responsibility to keep it as authentic as possible to get the best person to represent the community.”
Upon his return to Singapore, Adam – played by Salif Hardie in 2018 and Irsyad Dawood in 2023 – is forced to go through two rites of passages: the cultural and religious ceremony of circumcision, and the national, secular duty of NS.
Jon Jon says these milestones not only mark the transition from boyhood to manhood, but are also about acceptance of one’s role in the community and the accountability that comes with it.
“When you accept it, that’s when you can transit. In order for Adam to be a man, according to his mum, he has to accept his responsibility as a Singaporean son, he has to accept this liability as a Muslim man.
“All the other characters also go through certain rites of passages, and it all comes down to them having to accept what this passage has brought them to.”
Fared says it is an awareness of the weight of these moments that led him to decide that his son will be circumcised only at the age of five or six, instead of as a baby.
“You want him to face that fear – otherwise, he won’t know what he went through,” he says. “I did it when I was five or six, so rites of passages are also about upbringing, how each family chooses to take the practice forward.”
Farah Ong reprises her roles as Adam’s mother and grandmother, who has dementia.
Fared feels strongly about this choice, as his mother cared for his father, who also had dementia, and he saw first-hand the toll it took on her as a caregiver.
“With this staging, I’m hoping we can focus a bit more on not just the patient, but also the people surrounding them.”
One of the biggest creative differences from the 2018 iteration is the set, which Fared has commissioned so it resembles a brain or nervous system.
The four-member cast also includes singer Aisyah Aziz as a “maker of men” doctor who forms a relationship with Adam, in a role previously played by Munah Bagharib.
Jon Jon says it is apt that only the character with dementia is played by the same person. “It’s really poetic that the character that forgets comes back again. She’s the only one that remains, the one that ties the two productions together.”
Book It / Potong
Where: Esplanade Theatre Studio, 1 Esplanade Drive str.sg/i4L9
When: May 18 and 19, 8pm; May 20, 3 and 8pm; May 21, 3pm
Admission: $38
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