3 Fat Virgins Unassembled : A Review

by Carmen Nge

Student theatrical performances can be nerve-wracking events. The weeks leading up to opening night are often a volatile mixture of inexperience, inordinately high hopes and fear of the unknown: will audiences respond favourably or will the play be a flop? Anxiety plagues professional theatre practitioners as well but student actors have an added concern: they want to be evaluated as legitimate performers, not beholden to the yardstick of ‘student’.

One way to break free of this limitation is to take on a play that is both sufficiently challenging to showcase the amateur talents as well as sufficiently “adult” to indicate that the students are ready to break away from their university cocoon. Singaporean writer Ovidia Yu’s 1995 play, 3 Fat Virgins Unassembled, was indeed an apt choice for the first batch of students to graduate from Sunway University College’s Department of Performance and Media.

This writer attended their last show, curious to see if the young actors had the stamina to outlast their five-performance run. The ensemble of four female actors, directed by Zahim Albakri, held their own, adroitly navigating a rather tight space with a minimalist set, and playing to a full house comprising college mates, relatives and members of the non-Sunway affiliated public.

The play tackles themes that are decidedly gynocentric: girlhood, womanhood, motherhood, wife-hood, and the bane of a woman’s existence: men. Three actors—Cindy Tey, Helena Foo and Nurul Ain Mohammed Jamlus—interchanged the different women characters, while Joylynn Teh played the narrator and the men.

The performances were energetic and despite inhabiting different characters, each actor communicated a particular personality on stage. Tey was very versatile—endearing as the wide-eyed, science experiments-loving child and affecting as the serious proto-feminist. On the one hand she was stoic and no-nonsense with the overbearing and sexually crass men in her life; on the other, she was insecure and conflicted about her choice of career and sexuality.

Foo’s character explored women’s uneasy relationship with food, a source of both pleasure and pain. A remarkably entertaining actor, Foo made her audiences laugh out loud with her gastronomic antics and hilarious striptease; but she also infused the character of the dieting wife with a subtle melancholy reserved for those who want to be happy with themselves, yet at the same time, are desperate to fit into a body conscious society.

Nurul Ain was mostly confined to playing the role of wife and mother, which she infused with soft-spoken sophistication and executed with practiced ease. She was demure and domesticated, content to live the fantasy of motherhood bliss and oblivious to her lusty husband and his unabashed paramour.

If the women were decidedly feminine and frenetically frivolous, then Teh’s male characters oozed with bombast and machismo. Yu’s play chose to capitalize on stereotypically sexist male traits, which Teh camped and hyped up. There were more than one male character but they became an undifferentiated mass of testosterone. Teh’s resonant and rich-timbered voice also suited the role of the narrator—a calm but scathingly critical omniscient presence.

Unfortunately, the fragmented pace of 3 Fat Virgins Unassembled did not really give much room for this writer to ponder exactly what Ovidia Yu meant by her term “fat virgin”. The surrealistic ending of the play, which found the characters relishing their freedom in a virgin forest, was an ill-fitting and clichéd essentialist climax to an otherwise postmodern satire. The four women, however, proved that one does not have to be fat or a virgin to be actors of mettle, worthy of a rousing audience.

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This review was published in Off The Edge, 2006.