Pattareeya Puapongsakorn is undoubtedly the most promising young playwright on the Bangkok scene today. Back in July her play The Plastic Girl In The Fantastic World premiered at Take Off Festival for fresh university graduates. It was the only production from the festival (so far) picked up by theatre professionals and refitted in a flashier production with an entirely new cast of Thailand's top comedic actors — and is now known as Plastic Girl. It was chosen as the play to officially open a stylish new performance venue, Thong Lor Art Space, which has already been hosting and producing several programmes of short performances since May.
Plastic Girl, Play
And it is not surprising why Pattareeya's play has garnered such attention from both the audience and her fellow theatre practitioners. The funny and intelligent Plastic Girl In The Fantastic World is easily one of the best, if not the best, original plays I've seen on the Bangkok stage in years. This is not only indicative of the dearth of quality original plays in Thailand, but also how efforts by the theatre community, especially in the past two years, to promote original material is paying off bit by bit.
The Plastic Girl In The Fantastic World is Pattareeya's first full-length play, which she wrote two years ago. She rewrote it for the Take Off Festival and gave it another rewrite for the current restaging at Thong Lor Art Space, but kept the main plot points. Now renamed Plastic Girl, the play tells the story of Barbie and Ken's relationship that takes a disastrous turn, for Barbie anyway, when Ken decides to come out of the closet. This is complicated by the fact that Ken has been having an affair with Alan from the company's Happy Family line for years. Barbie, outraged by Ken's newfound independence and commercial success as a gay doll and her own dwindling sales, sets out to destroy her former lover's popularity and restore her own.
In Thong Lor Art Space's hand, Plastic Girl has transformed into a more visually realised production, with a fittingly cheery and doll house–inspired set design by Thong-Glur Tongta and his team and flashy and luxurious costumes by Nicha Puranasamriddhi.
The cast, Pariya Wongrabiab, Kreingkrai Fookasem, Malys Choeysobhon, Parnrut Kritchanchai and Khanchai Kleebkaraket as Barbie, Ken, Alan, Midge (Alan's constantly pregnant wife) and Barbie's agent respectively, bring a more devilish tone and comedic precision to the new production. Seeing actors like Pariya and Kreingkrai playing and excelling in slapstick comedy and over-the-top acting is nothing new. Parnrut as Midge, however, sheds her usual ironic veneer and brings a touch of vulnerability to her comedic shtick.
And yet, this version of Plastic Girl, led by new-blood director and playwright Jaturachai Srichanwanpen, lacks the poignancy and depth of its original. The comedy here, while successful at making the audience laugh, blunts the play's intellectual edge that gleamed much brighter in the previous production.
The original Plastic Girl felt to me like an astute and nuanced social, cultural and even political critique in a melodrama guise. The characters seemed to be trapped under a totalitarian regime, which they had for a long time enjoyed and profited from but were finally waking up to its ugly realities. In that version, the dolls were portrayed as misunderstood public figures whose glamorous (in the case of Barbie and Ken) or cozy (in the case of Alan and Midge) lives belied very real and human struggles in a system that only gave them illusions of choices.
In the current version, Barbie and Ken are petty, vindictive, disloyal and superficial — mere stereotypes of spoilt celebrities. The characters of Alan and Midge have vast potential to be more than a repressed gay husband and a repressed frumpy housewife, but in the restaging, their roles feel significantly reduced and more caricatured. Alan is shown in one scene as a neglectful husband and father. In another, he's a devoted lover who's naïve about the politics of fame. Then he disappears from the picture. Meanwhile, Midge is portrayed as a clueless and frumpy housewife who yearns for Barbie's lifestyle, but her miseries and desires are poked fun at rather than depicted with sensitivity by Pattareeya.
The rewrite and restaging of the play feel premature — less than three months after its premier — and what we get is a quickly reassembled second edition in a prettier box.
