Playhouse East’s WIP Festival seems like a natural match for Auka Productions’ debut play, Hot Pot. Both the WIP Festival and Auka Productions, set up by Struan Davidson and Windson Liong, take their mission of bringing emerging writing to life very seriously. Hot Pot, from director Namoo Chae Lee and writer Hongwei Bao, is a brilliant example of how new writing can start powerful conversations.
Like all the plays in the WIP Festival, the set for Hot Pot is minimal. There’s a restaurant table prepared for four diners, around which four rabbit statues loom: decorative, yet conspicuous.
The audience gets a glimpse into their significance when Windson Liong, who also plays Tao, begins his monologue on the Rabbit God, protector of homosexual love and relationships. Just like how the gleaming white rabbit statues stand out on stage, the monologues are also moments of excellence – strong writing, captivating performance – within an already solid play.
Beyond the monologues, Hot Pot focuses on a reunion of four friends over the course of a hot pot dinner. While Ming (Struan Davidson) and Mei (Shin-Fei Chen) have pursued successful careers and obtained wealth by conforming more closely to societal expectations, Lin (Michelle Yim) and Tao’s pursuit of freedom has come at the cost of the economic security and community approval Ming and Mei enjoy.
Interspersing past dinners when they were hopeful students with the present-day depiction of four adults living with the consequences of the decisions they made in their youth, Bao offers four deeply empathetic characters whose choices are equally nuanced and heartbreaking.
The strength of the play is in its masterful storytelling and the way the Rabbit God’s story is subtly reflected throughout – in the conversations of censorship, heteronormativity, secrecy and even in simple embraces. Allowing for similar subtlety in some of the dialogue between friends would only have enriched the play further: the over-explanation of the pandemic or the importance of their journalism course was occasionally jarring and disruptive to what felt gently flowing.
However, for a play participating in a festival designed to help new work find its feet, Hot Pot not only stands up, it stands out. Through this tender reflection on how survival can look different for many queer people in East Asia and the diaspora, playwright Bao brings two of the most universal experiences to the stage: love and its partner, sacrifice.
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