review

The days of the COVID-19 pandemic may feel like they are fading into the distance, but many of the issues that arose during ‘this difficult time’ — as many came to know it — have yet to fully be addressed. Days in Quarantine hits you like lightning; bright, powerful, confrontational, and over in an instant. You are left feeling so much from sadness to hope to panic to loneliness to joy. There is a sense of transparency and vulnerability that left my heart palpitating from start to finish. The play was set up in a multi-room open-space format which allowed the audience to move with the cast through the individual spaces and stories and monologues of very personal problems. Think Modern Love meets Love Actually but pandemic style, and you’ll start to understand the beauty of this play. There is a sense of brutal honesty to the stories paired with a sprinkling of necessary hope in the face of the immense difficulties and pains we have all faced in some way. By showing many types of relationships that were torn, built, tested, broke, and begun anew — relationships between family, between friends and strangers alike — Days in Quarantine portrays something we have all felt: that we are together even when we feel alone. All the characters were depicted with the utmost delicacy through the incredibly complex issues of love, race, social justice, and loss that are interwoven into one beautiful story which confronts and connects us in an undeniably human way.

The play does a wonderful job of creating an intimate environment that feels raw and personal — yet it keeps its distance. In doing so, the feeling of limbo during the pandemic was brought to life. There was a true portrayal of the nothingness in everything, the indifference and monotony felt by all and the desperate need for a connection. Everyone was trying any and all ways of connecting through phones, through the news, through random interactions with neighbours you’d never seen before. Anything to put the loneliness in a box and to shorten the distance. The intimacy between people near and far is undeniable and shown beautifully through the various snapshots of interactions we see as the audience. ‘Don’t listen to the loneliness’. We co-exist for a reason and the fragility of our inner being is inexorably intertwined with one another.

Co-existence on a global scale has not always been simple and it is far from perfect. The rise in recognition of racial and social justice issues is undoubtedly a positive aspect of the pandemic. Important discussions concerning the impact of race on relationships, on the feeling of oppression that many non-white, particularly Black and AAPI communities, have experienced during this tumultuous period. The obvious Black Lives Matter protests and the ‘Asian flu’ outcry led to an increase in hateful crimes everywhere. The characters of Jack and Sam were wonderfully skilled in handling the delicate topics which continue to mar their very existence. The emotional monologue that Jack performs about how confusing and painful it is to be considered too Western for Asian communities and for his heritage but also too Asian for anyone outside of the East hits you like a truck. He speaks a part of the monologue in Tagalog, and as the character Tommy says, ‘as long as you’ve got breath in your lungs, you keep fighting’. Importantly, the character of Danny reminds us about the classist issues of those who are raised in lower-income families and who are often forgotten about in the chaos of issues swirling like a tornado in the news. 

The stories gave me a real sense of appreciation for the time that I had experienced with my own parents — something that during the first lockdown had truly made me go crazy a few times. Living back at home, especially after not having lived in the same country, let alone house as them in the last few years, was surely an adjustment and one that I had not comprehended before now. The feeling like there isn’t enough time, that we should’ve had more time together, like it is all bittersweet, is something that truly resonated with me. It felt like it was all slipping away because we were all stuck. Claire, the character who was living alone far away from family, reminds us that in staying distanced and stuck, we are all doing our part, trying, just trying to survive and not go stir crazy. But survival is not necessarily the same as living, just like Eli, the doctor, who says that we should all try to ‘grow old while staying young’. The fast-paced nature and emotional moving pictures taken in by the audience about such a stagnant time show the power of human potential when we come together, when we care for one another. Days in Quarantine is like a breath of fresh, hopeful, needed air. I just hope one day this play is able to move to a bigger stage or be immortalised in the form of a film or limited series; I want to be able to rewatch it again and again, to be reminded of the life that we all have around and within us, and to feel the beauty of connecting with one another.