Hungry Ghosts

Jean Tong

• Publisher: Currency Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781760622343
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

A plane falls out of the sky. A large sum of money falls into someone's pocket. A young woman falls in and out of place and home.

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Hungry Ghosts interlaces the disappearance of flight MH370 with political corruption scandals in Malaysia and the search for identity in the ambiguous space of the new migrant.

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Lost souls, victims of foul play, seekers. Jean Tong's unconventional new play interrogates the mystery of absence and existence, presence and loss.

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How do you lose that much money? How do you lose something that big? How many planes do you have to lose before people forget about the money you lost?

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PRE-SHOW: ANIMAL KINGDOM

PROJECTION: A video made up of montages of the deep sea, various weird fish and pistol shrimp is projected onto an empty stage while the audience enters. The video is a little scruffy and homemade. The crackling sounds of pistol shrimp clicking underwater.

1:	The pistol shrimp is a species of crustacean that only grows to about three to five centimetres long, but competes with sperm whales for noisiest animal in the ocean. Colonies of pistol shrimp generate so much background noise that they misdirect military and scientific sonar used to detect underwater objects.
3:	One of their claws, a snapper over half the size of its body, makes this noise.
1:	When this snapper slams shut, it creates a cavitation bubble— a literal cavity, a void, a millisecond of nothingness, a vacuum suspended in the middle of the ocean—that explodes when the rest of the ocean rushes back to fill that rip.
2:	I wonder what it’s like in that bubble. In that absolute quiet, in the silence of a million waves, billions of networks of oceanic activity. Imagine that peace. It stretches on forever, a silence where anything could happen. I could be anyone. Do anything. I could hide in that silence. I could become something in that silence. I could weaponise myself, kill a king. I could make myself the greatest, most invisible danger of the big blue sea wrapped in a tiny, tiny, shrimp body. And then the moment passes, and the great crushing weight of the ocean whooshes back in.

SCENE: TELL-ALL 1

2:

Hi. Sorry, I’ve been really busy. Listen, I have to run soon but— No, everything’s fine. It’s six-thirty, daylight savings, two hours, yeah. Yeah, I’ve eaten. I called because— No, no, it’s fine, I didn’t get hit by a car— Listen, listen, can you just— Hello, can you hear me? Yeah, it’s just about the trip, I— Yeah, it’s just been really I think I have to, I won’t be able to, I can’t quite get time off, so I Yeah, I don’t know when I can Sorry Listen, I actually have to go but— Yeah yeah yeah. We’ll talk soon. Sorry. Again. Bye, love you. Bye.

SCENE: TRAGEDY PORN

1:	It’s a bird
3:	It’s Superman
2:	It’s a plane, fuckhead
3:	There are people
1:	The people are burning the plane
3:	My people are burning because of the plane
1:	I could’ve been on that plane
3:	I wish I’d been on that plane
1:	I was almost on that plane
2:	I was nineteen
1:	I was on that plane. No-one was screaming. By the end, no-one was screaming.
3:	Hypoxia—
1:	Depressurisation of the cabin, which knocks you out into a happy uncon...