Happy Place

Gateway Theatre
Thursday, 8pm

Happy Place is a sad muddle, cramming in too many underdeveloped issues into a short runtime. This is a pity as playwright-actress Jo Tan obviously feels for the subject matter.

Drawing on her personal experience as a radio deejay, she delves into the disjunct between the relentlessly peppy tone of morning radio shows versus the challenges of the pandemic-threatened real world.

There is also an angsty detour into the role of artists and creators, a dead giveaway that this work was birthed in the pandemic crisis that spawned much heartache and exacted a crushing toll on the arts community and beyond. 

Tan plays Val, a deejay whose co-host Poe (Jamil Schulze) has gone absent without official leave. Her guest on this fraught morning is Estee (Rebekah Sangeetha Dorai), “Singapore’s Rupi Kaur” and a frenemy from junior college. 

The three-member cast throw themselves wholeheartedly into the script in this production commissioned by Gateway Theatre.

Tan’s Val ricochets from perky brightness to passive-aggressive bullying to borderline hysteria with conviction, even if the script cannot always carry the abrupt emotional shifts.

Estee is the calm, ethical mirror that cracks Val’s fragile facade and Dorai delivers a key monologue about the price of beauty standards with the requisite fear and fury even as the speech bounces the storyline off on a tangent. 

Schulze deserves an honourable mention because for the majority of the 64-minute runtime, he is reduced to hectic, wordless miming behind shadowy scrims as Poe wakes up late and braves a commute through literal hell to get to the radio show. 

Even as Val and Estee’s relationship melts down on live radio, an apocalyptic plague called “evanescence” is spreading like wildfire in the real world. 

There are promising moments which are never quite spun out into a cohesive whole.

The barbed banter between Val and Estee captures that peculiar passive-aggressive competitive dynamic between women.

Val’s tips about radio talk-show etiquette are funny because they nail the absurdity and artificiality of the medium, which, after all, is meant as light entertainment. 

Tan has real writing chops, winning the 2022 The Straits Times Life Theatre Award for Best Original Script for her one-woman show King.

But the story here collapses under the weight of its own anxieties, as the plot of Val and Estee’s estrangement leans heavily on mean-girl tropes that prove too weak a foundation for the more serious themes of artists’ existential crises and doomsday scenarios. 

BOOK IT/HAPPY PLACE

Where: Black Box, Gateway Theatre, 3615 Jalan Bukit Merah
When: Saturday, 3 and 8pm, and Sunday, 3pm
Admission: From $28
Info: str.sg/io58