North Diversion Road is a really well-written play. I love the final scene and I love what Eleanor and Shouchen brought to it. A dying wife asking her husband to marry a girl he had an affair with after her death because she does not want him to be alone. Unfathomable madness or complete selflessness? I say it's the latter. When you truly love someone, that person's happiness is what should matter the most.
Each time I listen to the conclusion of the play from behind the curtain, I find myself tearing. I cry because real love gives us the strength to do things we never thought we were capable of doing, of saying things we never thought we could say, of allowing ourselves to hurt in order that the other person can be happy. I cry because those 2 characters in the concluding scene find a resolution denied every other couple in the play. It reminds me that love between 2 people can be such a wonderful thing to experience.
During the feedback session last Saturday night with the students from Republic Poly who came to watch the show, Jonathan Lim, our Director said something that stuck with me. He said that the couple in scene 5 had to kill themselves because no matter how much they loved each other, the relationship had changed because trust had been broken through the husband's infidelity. For them, the couple who valued perfection, that breach of trust would always remain a flaw in the marriage. I then immediately thought of the incident 2 weeks ago when my books got wet from the rain and got soaked at the edges. No matter how much I tried drying them, the edges remain creased. And so it is with a relationship where trust has been betrayed, the creases remain no matter how much you try to remove them.
This was a very mature play for many of us, yet I think most of us have had enough experience in life and love to handle the demands of the play. Perhaps some of us didn't quite get all that could be gotten out of the scenes we played at this point of time in our lives (I think I probably could have done more with my first scene) but I think we all have grown emotionally from working on our scenes, from watching one another work and from being a team, putting this whole show together mostly on our own.
Thank you Tony Perez for writing this play and thank you Jonathan Lim for trusting us to recreate these characters under your invaluable guidance ...
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I already told you this, but I just have to reiterate that I LOVE your book analogy!
Think about this though: for a formula to be perfect, it has to have imperfections. Likewise, there is Order in Chaos. Like Yin and Yang. Like straight lines don't exist in nature. Like how no matter how you dissect or expand a graphical representation of the Chaos Theory, it still looks exactly the same.
The couple in Scene 5 were so remarkably similar that they were already imperfect in their perfection. They were the same, so there was no disagreement, no clash of opinion, and therefore no challenge and no progress. They stagnated. To put it simply, it became boring. The man, though he loved his wife, strayed -- to find the intellectual (and very possibly sexual) stimulation he craved, with someone else who complemented, rather than mirrored, him. The woman, being highly intellectual herself, had to admit that he had done the only logical thing. And yet they were both driven by idealism, so this created a circular argument, a paradox to which there could be no resolution. The only way to end it, would be to act as if none of it had ever occurred -- and remove themselves from the equation.
I've grown to really love Scene 5 because there are so many layers to it. I'm gonna miss it greatly.
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