words hillary busis

Actors in a play about gay love get more than they bargained for

Sam Choy is bone-tired. He spends every evening the same way: falling in love and having his heart broken multiple times, all while dealing with the neuroses of his wayward sister and his pathetic best friend. ‘It’s emotionally too heavy for me,’ he sighs. ‘Every time I experience the whole thing again; every night I’m exhausted. It’s just too heavy to experience. It’s quite painful, actually.’

It’s Choy’s job to suffer. He’s preparing for the starring role in Rope of Love, Pak Li’s play about sex, toxic relationships and being young and gay in Hong Kong. Rope follows Sean, a college freshman played by Choy, as he embraces his sexuality, becoming involved with a mysterious man named Marcus he meets online. Sean and Marcus have a twisted courtship – they meet and have sex, though Sean may never see Marcus’s face. Later, Sean must also cope with the attraction he feels for Billy, his straight roommate, and a new relationship with independent-minded and unfaithful Ronald. Sean’s bad-girl sister, Sophia, and female buddy, Liza, also make occasional appearances.

After all that bed-hopping and emotional trauma, it’s no wonder Choy is worn out. At least he has an idea of what he’s in for – the upcoming production is actually a re-run of the Rope, which was originally staged last April at the Fringe Club. Li hopes that this new run will expose his work to a wider audience. ‘The first run was a school project, and most of the audience were students,’ he explains. ‘We didn’t want to limit it to a 400-member audience.’

Li also had another motivation for running his work a second time. ‘The play was the final project of my master’s degree, so after the first show run I was able to make some improvements to the characters and make the plot more compact,’ he says.

‘His final project got an A-,’ chimes in Rope director Terence Chang. ‘So maybe this time he wants to get that A.’

Li laughs at Chang’s gentle gibe and playfully pretends to swat him. The members of the Rope of Love team gathered here – Chang, Choy, Li, Harvey Sit (who plays Marcus), Melody Yuen (Sophia) and Suesan Kwok (Liza) – seem especially close to one another. As our conversation progresses, they frequently crack jokes and finish each other’s sentences. At one point, as Chang describes blocking the show, Yuen turns to Sit and asks him to give her a back rub. He complies immediately.

Perhaps their easy camaraderie is the result of a shared history. The four actors, the playwright and the director all either graduated from or are still studying at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts (HKAPA). Or maybe their rapport was born out of coming together to create such a serious, complex piece of theatre. Li says that Rope of Love is an exceedingly personal work, something he wrote after going through ‘experiences which have made me question the idea of love. If you try and please everyone without finding yourself, you just end up in the dark. I made the play dark to make the audience think about these questions.’

Of course, Rope of Love isn’t all gloom and doom. As Choy says with a laugh, ‘The girl’s scenes really save my ass onstage. The guy scenes are really, really heavy and painful. Every time I see my sister or my best friend onstage, they give me another energy, a break.’

Kwok and Yuen are glad to oblige, although it’s been difficult for them to reconcile playing straight female characters in a show that spends so much time exploring gay themes. ‘I remember watching the first run through and feeling very uncomfortable,’ Kwok admits. ‘I don’t know if I got used to watching it or if I accepted it, but it eventually became very ordinary to me.’ After performing in Rope of Love for the first time, she says, ‘Even when I came across men kissing on the streets and my friends would freak out, I didn’t find it to be a big deal.’

Yuen agrees: ‘Some of my friends reacted the same way when they saw the show.’ For some reason, she observes, people tend to respond more strongly to seeing men being intimate with one another when they see it in a play than when it is onscreen. ‘I think it’s an issue of distance,’ she says. ‘Seeing it in the movies is one thing, but when it’s happening right in front of you, it can be more of a shock and it takes longer to get used to. Theatre creates a bigger impact.’

That’s especially true of plays that tackle potentially controversial topics like homosexuality. Choy believes Rope of Love helps make gay culture more comprehensible to an audience unfamiliar with the realities of same-sex relationships. ‘The play explores issues of open relationships, there are characters who sleep around – of course, this is also present in straight relationships, but it’s more common in gay culture,’ says the actor. ‘After seeing the show, some of my straight friends understand the gay lifestyle a little more.’

Rope of Love also illuminates the important role the internet plays in helping young gay men to find each other. Li recalls that when he was a teenager, ‘you used more traditional methods to make gay friends, like having a pen pal or talking over the phone’. Today, those methods of communication have given way to cyberspace: ‘When I was 14 or 15, I was very scared to explore myself and the gay community,’ Li says. ‘Now you can just go on the internet and meet a lot of guys asking for sex. It’s really changed the state of relationships in gay culture.’

But Chang is quick to point out there’s more to Rope than gay love. What he admires most about the play is ‘how people can relate to it at so many levels. On the surface there is the gay issue, but the play’s effect extends beyond this.’ A lecturer at the HKAPA, he recalls students coming up to him after seeing the show in April and telling him that they could relate to Li’s characters regardless of their sexuality. ‘For me, I hope the play can achieve this effect again, and not just through the gay aspects of the story,’ Chang says.

In a broader sense, Rope of Love is really about relationships – the problems inherent with trying to form a true connection with another person. That’s what inspired Li to come up with his play’s title. As he explains, ‘The rope is the metaphor of the show. When Sean and Marcus have sex, Marcus ties Sean up; when people are in love they try to tie down the other and own them. But this is not really love, it’s just a sense of belonging. They are trying to get the other to belong to them.’

For Sit, it was difficult at first to get into character because he couldn’t relate to Rope’s overarching theme. ‘I’ve never been in a relationship, so it was really like starting from scratch for me,’ he says. ‘Terence, Pak and Sam all told me different things about gay relationships and eventually I was able to get an impression about what it’s like.’

But even after tutoring from his colleagues, Sit found himself struggling during one rehearsal show. ‘The audience was extremely close and I became quite embarrassed,’ he remembers. ‘I wasn’t used to the extent of the intimacy where you’re in your underwear doing a sex scene. It takes time to get over the nervousness. There really isn’t a method –you just have to expose yourself and let them see it.’

Sit’s not the only one who learned something new from Rope of Love: All the members of the team agree that the production has been an eye-opener. As Kwok says, ‘I remember one run-through when I was watching the others perform and it felt like something was revealed to me about my own experiences.’

Choy echoes her sentiments. ‘This character is really close to myself, so it gave me a lot of breakthroughs in acting and also personally,’ he says. ‘After performing this play I realized I don’t really know much about relationships because I make Sean’s choices in my own life, and they lead to a tragic end. So the play gave me a kind of revelation.’

Chang has a theory as to why Rope of Love has had such a powerful effect on his cast. ‘I think for young people playing young characters, it’s always like playback theatre, which means their own story is played back to themselves as a mirror. They look into the scenes and feel like a scene of their life is being played on stage. When you see a past life played back you get something more. It may not be crystal clear about what you’ve learned… but silently something will be developed in your mind and spirit.’ It’s his hope that the play will have a comparable effect on anyone who sees it – whether they’re gay, straight or somewhere in between.

Rope of Love will be staged at the Fringe Theatre from August 5-8 at 7:30pm and August 8 at 2:30pm. Tickets are $150 for adults, $120 for members of the Fringe Club, and $100 for full-time students, senior citizens over 65 or people with disabilities. They are available at www.hkticketing.com, 31 288 288. In Cantonese.