Session Zero

Checkpoint Theatre
Drama Centre Black Box
Thursday, 8pm

Playwright Jo Tan’s intimate and layered Session Zero – back for its first restaging since its sold-out socially distanced premiere in 2021 – asks if stepping out of one’s shoes is what is needed to say something true to each other.

Over a game of Dungeons & Dragons, an estranged couple (played by Tan and Brendon Fernandez), who have lost the plot of their marriage, are struggling to find a compelling story to stick it out, talking in codes through invented characters.

It is a nifty conceit for a couple’s last-ditch attempt to salvage a communication breakdown in their marriage. Throughout, there are versions of their real selves they cannot or are not willing to lose, even in this collaborative fantasy board game.

Tan’s candid character, nicknamed Speedy, is new to the game and sceptical of dedicated player Smokey’s nerdy – not to mention Eurocentric – obsession with world-building as he slips into a British accent for a character he likens to existing in the Middle-earth of fantasy writer J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings.

Smokey, on the other hand, is so constrained by his adherence to the rules of Dungeons & Dragons as to not understand why his wife is interested only in poking holes in his fantasy world, making up her own rules and quests.

The duo are playing an ostensibly no-stakes familiarisation game – the titular Session Zero – but the pressure steadily mounts as the audience discovers the insecurities of each character and the trauma that keeps them from becoming the people they want to be for each other.

Tan’s complex, nuanced script switches between this tense, combative game and episodes from the couple’s past. A dormitory hall meet-cute between Smokey’s theatre boy and Speedy’s track girl launches a relationship that sees a widening rift as race, gender, sexuality and attractiveness stand between the odd couple.

There are times – especially in the play’s present tense – that a more convincing frisson between Speedy and Smokey could have developed. One sees the world through the couple’s guarded fondness and wishes for more moments of reprieve from their standoffish postures.

Tan’s commendable and dramatic shape-shifting between characters (reminiscent of the playwright-actress’ one-woman, multiple-character show King) can sometimes also feel too far from Fernandez’s stoic and placid presentations, although he comes into his own emotional expression in a powerful and explosive scene later on.

In moments where the duo’s energies match, shades of unresolved conflict come to a potent head – built on the seemingly insurmountable differences between Smokey’s broody artistic character and Speedy’s anxious contract lawyer.

Appropriately, for a script about the balm of conjuring up one’s own fantasy, an austere set by Petrina Dawn Tan featuring a long white table and two chairs is a perfect step away from the naturalistic set design that Checkpoint’s shows favour.

With co-lighting designer Tai Zi Feng, nine shafts of neon light bars evenly spaced around the stage glow in different configurations throughout the show. They suggestively apportion the space in the theatre to conjure the corridors of memory as well as a dormitory hall, gay club, living room, theatre stage and game play.

Checkpoint joint artistic director Huzir Sulaiman’s direction and dramaturgy keep the play brisk and intriguing, transitioning between states of fantasy and reality without so much as an exposed seam to take the audience into a similar world of immersive game and power play.

Beneath the play’s narrative is a universal story of how people give up their own agency in defining who they are when they listen only to the stories that others tell of them and play by others’ rules.

Session Zero is a couple’s heart-rending exercise in letting go of the predetermined stories they have come to accept of themselves in favour of, however difficult it may be, inventing their own.

Book It/Session Zero

Where: Drama Centre Black Box, 100 Victoria Street
When: Till Oct 29; Tuesdays to Fridays, 8pm, Saturdays, 3 and 8pm, Sundays, 3pm
Admission: $38
Info: Advisory 16 (some mature content), go to str.sg/ipFo