Would you like some fries with that coffin?

A one-man show. Leftist theater from Singapore. Sitting in the Yale Cabaret, watching ice cream sundaes land on crowded tables, and listening to the quiet swing in the background, I felt some apprehension. I was waiting for Bing Crosby to be eclipsed by something aggressive, angry, at the very least polemical. I only draw attention to my ignorance because I suspect it may be a common misperception. While Kuo Pao Kun's The Coffin is Too Big for the Hole certainly engages social concerns specific to Singapore, the play, performed by Alec Tok, DRA '03, is a pointedly personal experience.

COURTESY YALE CABARET The Cabaret kicks off its season with a one-man show production, plus a funky new logo.

Tok portrays the eldest grandson in his family, telling the story of his grandfather's burial. The problem is that his grandfather, a man who prizes tradition over the efficiency characteristic of contemporary Singapore, has chosen a very large coffin. The coffin is so large that it cannot fit inside the standard size hole that has been prepared for it. The hole cannot be made bigger without encroaching on the adjacent graves, so the eldest grandson insists that his grandfather and his large coffin must have a second plot.

In his telling of the story, we see the eldest grandson impersonate the staff of the cemetery. He is accompanied to the gravesite by a powerless worker, who repeats his employer's schpiel, most importantly insisting on the rule of "one man, one plot." The grandson persists until he gains an audience with a whiny, effete officer, who refuses to violate "national planning" to accommodate the unusually large coffin.

Anyone who's ever worked in fast food will recognize this situation. When I was paying my teenage dues at the local Subway, there used to be this kind of scruffy, semi-homeless guy who would come in every once in a while and order a meatball sub, oh, could you put a few more meatballs in there, and how 'bout some of that bacon, oh man, is that all the cheese you get, and why don't you drizzle a little more oil on that, and I'm trying to hold him back because the boss is staring over my shoulder counting how many pennies each slice of cheese is costing him, and the line is backing up behind him. There is a system, and making exceptions causes problems.

But, to state the obvious, this is not a story about meatball subs, or, as the eldest grandson puts it, a case of drawing rectangles in a parking lot. Industrialization may affect the food we eat, how we get around, and the things we say, but the grandson refuses to let the need for efficiency dictate the conditions of his grandfather's burial. He draws a line between the sacred and the secular, and the play asks the audience members to examine what lines, if any, they would be willing to draw.

Though the play is concerned with issues specific to Singapore, whose population density and corporate culture create the kind of bureaucracy the grandson encounters, it resonates not only with concerns many of us have about our own increasingly corporate culture, but with one of the oldest stories in Western literature. For as a hero who insists upon a sacred burial despite the limits imposed by society, the grandson reenacts the story of Antigone. When she buries her brother, ignoring the edict that, as an enemy of Thebes, he must be left to the dogs, Antigone, like the grandson, claims a part of her life as sacred, beyond the reach of secular concerns, whether those concerns be efficient land use or military posturing. The specific social concerns addressed in The Coffin is Too Big for the Hole imply much larger and older questions.

The audience barely feels the hand of director Karron Graves, DRA '03. This is a wonderful thing for the play and a sign of skill. It is important not only to the style but to the content of the play that Tok's performance feels natural, personal, and not directed. If it makes an argument about the oppressiveness of a blindly efficient, impersonal society, this play's strongest point is in the very real connection that Tok is able to make with the audience. Theater is an inefficient practice: it makes much more sense just to do it once and let the people watch it on film. But if you go to the Cabaret this weekend, and I suggest that you do, you may walk out convinced that not only in burial, but in storytelling, efficiency is not the most important thing.

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