Fat Virgins, Fast Cars and Asian Values

Introducing some of Singapore's finest young playwrights, this is the first collection of local plays from the Theatreworks Writers' Laboratory, an event long overdue. The 9 plays in this collection are the product of an intense period of workshop activity from the Writers' Lab in 1991.

Diverse in theme and style, the plays challenge the reader's everyday assumptions, presenting the ordinary, mundane and familiar from a unique and often disturbing perspective. Bernard's Story is about rape, and the psychology of a rapist; Lest The Demons Get To Me explores an unusual individual's tensions and conflicts, arising from his family's pressure on him to conform. Fast Cars and Fancy Women is a Faustian tale exposing the pitfalls of glitzy materialism and vacuous values; Absence Makes The Heart Grow Fonder explores the weaknesses of a taken-for-granted family structure; Home deals with the problems of growing old, and of facing the prospect of imminent death. Blood and Snow is an original Elizabethan-style fairy tale with an existential motif, while Good Asian Values looks at a hypocritical and materialistic society from the amusing yet honest perspective of a seven-year-old boy. Three Fat Virgins Unassembled and Bra Sizes both have feminist themes, challenging popular images of women, and presenting what it is like to be a woman in a male-dominated Asian society. 

This book is for anyone interested in the best and most provocative writing Singapore theatre has to offer.

(Source: Fat Virgins, Fast Cars and Asian Values blurb)