Love Is Hard. So Is Mental Health. Singapore Playwright James Thoo's New Play Explores Survival In The Social Media Age

11pm. My wife, Alicia, is lying next to me in bed. Our older daughter, Zoe, is splayed between us, just fallen asleep. And Alicia now, finally free to rest for a few minutes, begins flicking through social media. Her dinner is still out on the kitchen island. By the time she’d got home from work (around 9:45pm), she wasn’t in the mood to eat and besides, she had to put Zoe to sleep.

She’s always looking at the same stuff, and it’s pretty incredible —  you’d be surprised how much mums in 2023 are able to do. They have full-time jobs, but they also host cookie-making parties for their kids (with homemade dough!) and their kids’ friends. They manage teams of 30 to 40 employees at the upstream business where they work, but they also teach their kids how to read The Hungry Caterpillar in the evening, and they always have time and energy to dress up for a girls’ night #margaritamoms. These mums are flat-out incredible. Truly. They’re like if Jane Fonda was Jane Fonda and a Navy SEAL, and also the first female President. And there are tons of them! All amazing in their own unique way. It really isn’t hard to check them out. They’re all in one place: Instagram.

Instagram should be fun with its revolutionary access and insights into your favourite celebrity’s life. But the longer-lasting imprint as Alicia shuts her eyes to drift off into sleep is usually not Olivia Culpo at the Met Gala. It’s her colleague who has a 20-part Insta-story on how she just got promoted, is hosting an investor panel, taking her son to the park, and rounding that all up with a cocktail night with the hubby — “Date night with this one! xx”

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Alicia wonders why it’s so hard for her just to do a good job at work, never mind anything else. And then try and fail to put our younger daughter, Lea, to bed because she is sleep-regressing, then try, and fail, to put Zoe to bed, because all Zoe wants is for Daddy to fling her across the living room face-first into a stack of pillows.

One unfortunate byproduct of men belatedly accepting that women can do everything is women feeling the pressure that they must. Which is incredible for many, but some women can’t do that, which is okay, too. Some women don’t want to do that. Also totally fine. Some women work really long days. Hard days. They have stressful days. Afterwards, to relax for half an hour, they’d like to watch a Netflix game show where contestants have to guess if something is cake or not. Being a woman — being a human being, period — is really, really hard. And no one should feel bad about themselves because they aren’t doing as much as someone else.

Especially when you really don’t know what anyone else is doing at all. Maybe you can see their results at work, maybe you can see pictures of their trip to the zoo with the kids. But maybe you aren’t seeing the two hours of sleep they’re allowing themselves so they can do those things. Maybe you aren’t seeing the self-medication required to power them. Maybe you aren’t seeing tears. Exhaustion. Stress. Despair. Something has to give. Maybe that photo someone posted, where she’s blissfully enjoying a mother-daughter ceramics class, was the only one of two hundred she took trying to get a smile from the kid who hated everything about it.

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I do it, too. A few months ago my wife and I took her parents to Europe. I posted every few days: a picture of us all dressed as vikings in Norway. Us having gelato in Dubrovnik. The kids seeing snow for the first time. Everyone having pastries in Copenhagen. Here’s what I didn’t post: two lost bags, one delayed flight, one cancelled flight, everyone getting food poisoning in Bergen, us nearly dying on a Norwegian highway because I had to drive on the other side of the road for the first time ever at one in the morning (thanks to the delayed flight) in a hail storm, me dropping my phone in an ice lake, Lea waking up 5-6 times every night because her comforter was in one of those lost bags, and Zoe throwing a tantrum three to four times everyday, because she can suck as a human being.

In 600BC, King Nebuchadnezzar II’s wife Queen Amytis was homesick after having to move from her native Media to Babylon. So to help her see that there could be beauty anywhere, he commissioned the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, a series of spectacular, planted terraces that seemed to float in midair. I’ve never been good with plants, or architecture, or structural design, or stone-masonry, or making things seem to float in mid-air. The only thing I’m half decent at — other than picking a life partner — is words. And you can only talk about a thing, and tell somebody that they’re far exceeding expectations, and that you love them, and you’re so grateful to have them, and that if you have one hope for your daughters it is that they grow up to be exactly like her, that you couldn’t function without her, that she is everything to you, and that to be honest the cake show is actually kind of growing on you, in so many words.

Unfortunately, as a writer, words are all I have. And as the old adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. And nowadays there are a thousand pictures. A million. And six of them are of the hanging gardens and the rest are of that annoying girl in P2P sales who does spin class over lunch and takes her twin boys to interactive theatre in the evening even though she’s exhausted, because #momlife.

So I have to up my game. I have to wage the war for Alicia’s happiness (or at the very least, contentment) and tell her how much I love her and appreciate her with the artillery of picture, too. So I decided to write a play about all of this: The pernicious effect of thinking you know what’s really going on with people just from the information they put on the internet, letting that affect your self-esteem, your happiness. It’s called Trouble Came, and it's being staged over the 25th, 26th and 27th of August. Please feel free to come, take a picture there, and post it. But only if you look really happy in it.

TROUBLE CAME

Grab your BFF, partner, or ride-or-die tribe for this intimate staging of 'Trouble Came,' a modern comedy that examines how far we’re willing to go to become someone else’s version of “happy”. James Thoo writes and directs this original play, starring Kimberley Kiew, Kimberly Chan, Steven Murphy, Jon Cancio, Hamza Qaiser, Monil SJ.

Venue: Black Box at Goodman Arts Centre
Dates: August 25, 26, 27
Tickets: $40 to $48 (with bundle deals)
IMDA Advisory 16 (some mature themes)