SINGAPORE – First staged by Gateway Arts during the Covid-19 pandemic, American playwright Lauren Gunderson’s I And You is getting a Singapore rerun as issues around youth mental health continue to take centre stage post-pandemic.
At the heart of this intimate two-hander is the unlikely teenage friendship between the socially isolated Caroline (Evangel Wong) and the charming star basketball player Anthony (Zulfiqar Izzudin). The former stays home from school as she grapples with liver cancer and the latter appears at Caroline’s doorstep with a copy of American poet Walt Whitman’s Leaves Of Grass.
Wong, a 21-year-old theatre studies undergraduate at the National University of Singapore, relates to Caroline’s state of mind. She says that general stress about school work, anxiety and depression, compounded by growing up in the internet age, are not just Covid-19 problems.
But she also identifies with Anthony: “He’s optimistic and tries to pull people out of it and he listens – I’m also that person for my friends.”
Wong’s co-actor Zulfiqar, 30, on the other hand, relates more to Caroline. Zulfiqar says he once spent three days locked up in his room, which is devoid of sunlight and “creepily close” to Caroline’s room in the play.
“She does her work here, she has fun here, sleeps here, food gets delivered here – all she has to do is just call out for her mum.”
That, Zulfiqar says sheepishly, is him, “without the mum part”.
It is this epidemic of youth isolation and mental health issues that led director Samantha Scott-Blackhall to stage this play in 2022 and restage it. She says: “It concerned me that there were so many young people who were happy to stay at home and not have to go out, and I felt that it was necessary to talk about the dangers of that.”
Despite the restrictions on theatre capacity and use of masks during the first run of I And You, Scott-Blackhall recalls hearing gleeful giggles, gasps and sobbing in the theatre. She was surprised at how attached young people were to the story.
She says: “Their responses were so audible. When they watched something happen, it was almost like they couldn’t contain their reaction. It shook us a bit, we had to adjust our performance.”
Most memorably for Scott-Blackhall, one of her friends who had taken her teenage daughter to the show told the director: “She said to me, ‘Thanks for giving me a conversation starter.’ It allowed parents to talk about what they saw and ask if their child went through the same thing.”
Her friend’s daughter had asked to come back to watch the show a second time – the next time with her friends.
Recalling the reactions of his peers and friends, Zulfiqar is confident that the show will touch not just teenagers, but also adults. “Masculine men came to watch this show targeted at youths. After the show, when I met them, they had tears in their eyes and they hugged me and said: ‘Thanks bro.’”
Asked what might have moved these men, Zulfiqar says it is the realisation of “how they might have someone in their lives reaching out to them but they are just pushing that person away”.
The 90-minute show will include a 20-minute post-show dialogue facilitated by Touch Mental Wellness, which organises mental wellness awareness and counselling programmes.
While the restaging will not change much, Scott-Blackhall is working with the actors to bring out the richer subtext of the script. “I can say that, coming back to it a second time, I’ve realised that there are a lot of lines with double meaning. I think we’re having a few revelations about that, and then being able to provide some emphasis to the words.
“It’s the kind of play you’d want to watch twice.”
Book It/I And You
Where: Gateway Theatre Black Box, 3615 Jalan Bukit Merah When: May 17 to 25, 8pm (Fridays and Saturdays); 3pm (Saturdays) Admission: $35 Info: www.sistic.com.sg/events/iandyou0524
Correction note: In an earlier version of the story, it was stated that the show was staged by Gateway Theatre instead of Gateway Arts. This has been corrected. We are sorry for the error.
