Losing Face: From Script to Stage
10.08.23 Q Theatre, Auckland
When I went to see the play-reading of Losing Face in February, I was blown away. In my previous review, I had said that it’s a show that lingers and stays with you. I described it as exceptional, cutting, and witty. All of that still holds up in its fully staged version at the Q Loft. It still lingers like the scent of smoke; once you get a whiff of it, it’s all that you can smell—whether you like it or not.
Losing Face is Nathan Joe’s take on a domestic drama. On the face of it, the show is a reconciliation between Jennifer (Shervonne Grierson) and her father Mark (Andrew Ford) at a Christmas Eve dinner with Mark’s new boyfriend Shawn (Danny Lam). But it’s anything but conventional. To Joe, there was something appealing about tackling the oldest form of conventional playwriting. With this play, Joe is “pondering [his] roots as a playwright” and trying to honour “the whakapapa of playwriting,” but doing it in a way that “feels deeply queer, deeply Asian, deeply [himself] as much as feels right or possible.” What he’s come up with is “a domestic drama on loop… that’s trying to get itself right or correct course.” This is evident in the first few minutes of the show. The characters continually reset the scenario until the ‘right’ line is said and the scene progresses to the next checkpoint, and it continues to reset there until the next ‘right’ line is said, and so on. It’s, in essence, a series of failed reconciliations between a parent and their child.
There is something so vulnerable about seeing this play on stage. As Joe puts it, “most of the stories that we actually live and resonate with, the stories that actually are the truest to us, are domestic stories.” The stories that hit so close to home are the ones that are set in our homes; the things that we share with our loved ones that we would usually never share with anyone else publicly. They are stories about how we struggle—more specifically, how we struggle to reconcile with our families and loved ones. It’s a simple premise, and while the form of the show is mind-melting, the crux of the story remains committed to reconciliation.
As I have said in other reviews, Joe’s plays have tended to deteriorate the form of theatre. I love this because you never know what you’re walking into. I recall the first time I saw Losing Face at the play-reading, it was absolutely mind-boggling to me. Joe tells me that an ordinary domestic drama would not feel true to the current times. “Normalcy is not the norm… even though it's not a typical domestic drama, [he doesn’t] necessarily think it's an abnormal play for the moment in time that we're in”. It feels more authentic to tell a story in this “reset” Groundhog Day kind of way, because our realities are all full of “chaos and fragmentation, and glitches and malfunctions, and, in a sense, like a thing corrupting onto itself or into itself.”
While the play is referred to as a “reset” play with scenarios restarting from the beginning, it never fully resets. Obviously, as a theatre show, it would be impossible to do a movie-type reset where all of the props and the setting revert back to how the scene started instantaneously. There are limits to the medium, but it adds to the play in a different way. This is something that I wasn’t able to fully experience at the play-reading, because envisioning it in my head, the scenes did a movie-like transition. In the full staging, rather than completely starting from scratch, audiences are able to see the remnants of the destruction left in the scene before. The actors tread carefully around each other and the toppled props, carrying the energy that was built up from the previous versions of the scene and almost too knowingly avoiding confrontation. Though the stage is spacious and there are only three actors telling the story, the stage is filled with tension from the failed reconciliations that the characters reset from. And in seeing the reconciliations play out, I agree with Joe that it is more interesting to explore failures than it is successes. It is easy to pull off a successful reconciliation and have the characters compromise; it is more stimulating to have the characters navigate around each other, play with the ‘what if’ factor, and fail over and over again.
Like Joe, I shared a curiosity about how the transitions would be pulled off, but I was pleasantly met with very well-crafted sound design and lighting cues. The transitions are clean and sharp, and the first few resets of Jennifer were almost unbelievable to me because of the sheer speed of the costume changes. However, because of this, the transitions that didn’t have the same energy or tidiness stood out quite starkly in contrast. Nevertheless, as the play progresses, you slowly lose track of what scene exactly the characters are resetting from because of the dizzying speed the play ploughs forward at, and eventually, it feels like everything has just exploded and mushed into one gigantic mind-fuck.
In this fully staged version of Losing Face, the truth vs lie dichotomy is much more prominent to me than in the play-reading. The characters start off speaking their truth, but in all of those scenarios, the scene is reset because the characters can’t handle the truth. None of them actually want to hear the truth because hearing a lie is so much easier than dealing with the complexities of how the characters actually feel. Grierson puts on a devastating performance as Jennifer, demanding to know if her father loves his new boyfriend more than he loves her. And Ford, reciprocating the energy, is heartbreaking as a man who has been reluctantly cornered into a confrontation with his daughter. What is so central to Mark’s character is the concept of regret. “It’s such a palpable thing,” Joe says.
At points, I wanted the characters to just lie to each other so there would be less hurt, but that would just be shying away from the inevitable conflict between everyone. To have Mark simply tell Jennifer he loves her more would be dishonest to the story. It would have been so easy to make Mark the unequivocal villain of the story, but Joe has instead made him such a poignantly sympathetic character. It was important to Joe that all of the characters are sympathetic in their own way because “it’s the most interesting moral writing.” This is particularly the case for domestic dramas because they are inevitably “morally complex, we understand or sympathise with the characters.” The empathy that is generated isn’t one that “absolves [the characters] of their crimes,” Joe tells me. “The empathy isn’t trying to wash away their sins.” You eventually realise that the show isn’t about good versus evil or right versus wrong; all of the characters have a point, and all of the characters are flawed in their own way. There is no reliable narrator in this story—you’re presented with three sides to a story and you are tasked with the responsibility of piecing it together in a way that makes the most sense to you.
Importantly, the missing piece of the puzzle is Jennifer’s mother. She is an omnipresent figure in the play—even the sound effect of water rising to a boil conveys her presence. But most effectively exuding her presence is when Jennifer opts to speak Cantonese and refuses to engage in any Western practice. The lines and their delivery are absolutely scathing. The only time there is a physical mother-figure in the play is when Shawn has his scene with his mother and he attempts to come out to her but his efforts to reconcile that fact with the version of him that she knows are shut down by her. Lam is the underdog of the show. His performance of Shawn is subtle and effective. The quiet urgency of Shawn trying to communicate with his mother as they have a meal together is incredibly understated. There’s something about that scene and the active refusal to reconcile that sticks out to me in comparison to the other scenes where there are attempted but failed reconciliations.
The play ultimately doesn’t give you an answer on how to reconcile with your family and loved ones. Sometimes there is no successful reconciliation. Sometimes a successful reconciliation looks like a failure. Sometimes it feels like a failure. Sometimes the failed reconciliation is the success. But one thing is for sure: there’s the easy way out, and then there’s Joe’s version of the story.
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Cast: Andrew Ford, Shervonne Grierson and Danny Lam
Writer: Nathan Joe
Director: Samuel Phillips
Co-Presented By: Punctum Productions and Q Theatre
Producer: Nahyeon Lee
Dramaturg: Jane Yonge