By: Edward Goh Khiam Li
About Kintsugi
The play Everlife was performed from 20-22 January 2017 by USProductions at Yale-NUS’s Black Box. The poem Kintsugi chronicles how a play is born and is dedicated to the playwright, director and cast, and the supporting crew of Everlife and other productions teams everywhere, who have both agonized and delighted in their work. Because it was inspired by Everlife, it incorporates elements of the play’s narrative, primarily Abigail’s suicide and ghostly reappearance and the two haunted protagonists, Richard and Xinyi. The metaphors of the play came in two waves of inspiration: the Japanese craft of Kintsugi, and the dedicated religiosity of those involved in bringing mere words on a script to life.
Kintsugi (for Everlife)
Noun
- The art of repairing repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold.
- As a philosophy, to treat breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.
Chapter 1: The Death of the Innocents
The crockery smashed three years ago
The jars were broken, and so were the plates
And no longer could they hold wine or bread
The source of life was lost unto the abyss
That was Abigail, lost unto herself
Hanging on at the end of her rope
She had fought the good fight
Chapter 2: The Beatification
A heavenly playwright came along
Sorting the pieces of her life out
Wondering if it could be put back together
But to hide it, or beautify it
She was not sure
And she sorted the pieces of her life out
Joining them with gold
Embracing the cracks and crags as her own
A masterful work in human glory, the lives of Richard and Xinyi,
And Abigail, known but to God
Chapter 3: The Canonization
Then the high priestess and her actors were gathered
And they killed themselves every day
Over the presentation of the blessed broken
They tore themselves up
A blood sacrifice for their darkened deeds
They broke their bodies and minds
Immolating themselves on the altar of the drama
Their baptism of fire
That they may be remade with the lacquer of the saints’ essences
That they may transfigure the inanimate and breathe life into it
Chapter 4: The Celebration
And so the celestial chorus was summoned
The angels who sang the play into being
The playwright composed the movement, the priestess orchestrated the rites,
And the choirs moved heaven and earth for them
All these in three days
And tireless these heavenly movers were
Their toil the soul of the world
Autopsying their performance at the end of every day
They killed it, and rebuilt it
Each day harmonizing a better song
Chapter 5: The Resurrection
And so it was, at the end of the third day
The masses witnessed a miracle
Actors became else, worlds changed
And for a brief moment, infinitesimally small,
The dead rose to haunt the living in the confines of that black box
All who were present proclaimed the broken spectacle
And god beheld the play, and he found that it was good, and so it was
Amen
