Psychobitch
Wild Rice @ Funan, 3 to 20 August 2023
Direction: Pam Oei. Playwright: Amanda Chong
Set & Multimedia: Elizabeth Mak. Associate: Ian Lee.
Lighting: Adrian Tan. Sound: weish. Costumes: Max Tan.
“Multimedia artist Elizabeth Mak crafts Anya’s mind-blowing slide deck, with individual elements such as Galven’s company logo emblazoned on a car and Anya’s personal website logo designed just for this show, or even matching Anya’s periods to her emotional outbursts in a bloody animation, alongside being a genuinely eye-catching presentation.”
Anya, young Christian Tamil broadcast journalist, has been tasked by her Chinese ex-consultant crypto-bro fiancé to adjust the four episodes over the last 2 years where she has cried in public, to prove to him that this is a trend that will not continue after their marriage. Type-A office lady Anya decides she will rise to challenge and produce a slide deck to end all slide decks. Which is where I came in; to design Galven’s tech bro office and Anya’s professional but feminine slideshow decked out with AI-assisted animation. And as I told Pam and Amanda at our first meeting: where else would they find another designer who happened to also be married to an ex-consultant fintech entrepreneur?
My favorite part of this job was being able to animate bleeding vaginas on stage and have them land on our national broadsheet The Straits Times. As a teenager I often had cramps so bad that I would pass out in the school bathroom and someone would have to go look for me. There was something extremely satisfying about being able to put all that bloody pain out there, with Amanda shining a light with her humor on the non-so-funny parts of things like dysmenorrhea and endometriosis.
Anya’s story of a modern-day woman just trying so hard to get everything right was supremely relatable, and it was a pleasure to go through this journey with this character who learns what love is and how to learn to love herself along the way.
