Huzir Sulaiman: A Brief Biography and Summary of Works

One of the most critically acclaimed dramatists in Southeast Asia, and a 2007 Yale World Fellow, Huzir Sulaiman writes for theatre, film, television and newspapers, and is a consultant on public policy issues for the arts and heritage sectors.

Huzir was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and was educated at Princeton University. He now lives in Singapore, where he is a co-founder and Joint Artistic Director of Checkpoint Theatre.

His plays are frequently performed in Malaysia and Singapore and have been presented in Tokyo, Berlin, New York, and London. His work is collected in Eight Plays (Silverfish Books) and his plays - 14 to date - are studied in universities in the region. They range from Atomic Jaya (1998), a classic satire on what would happen if Malaysia decided to construct an atomic bomb, to Cogito (a commission of the 2007 Singapore Arts Festival), a lyrical exploration of grief, memory, and what it means to be human.

Wide Angle, his fortnightly column in Malaysia’s leading English newspaper, The Star, covers diverse topics in culture, politics, and society. He currently teaches playwriting at the National University of Singapore.

His father is Haji Sulaiman Abdullah, who was born G. Srinivasan Iyer, a Tamil Brahmin who later converted to Islam. Sulaiman is a veteran lawyer who served as Malaysian Bar Council president. His mother is Hajjah Mehrun Siraj, who has served as a professor, lawyer, consultant for United Nations agencies, NGO activists and a Commissioner with the Human Rights Commission of Malaysia.

For a short time in the early part of this decade, he hosted an afternoon talk show on WOW FM, a now-defunct Malaysian radio station.

He is currently married to Claire Wong, a Malaysia-born Singaporean stage actress.

source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huzir-sulaiman, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huzir_Sulaiman

An extensive interview with Huzir Sulaiman and his wife, Claire Wong can be found here:

http://www.todayonline.com/blogs/forartssake/we-rat-checkpoint-theatres-huzir-sulaiman-and-claire-wong

Summary of works:

ATOMIC JAYA

In Atomic Jaya, uber-talented theater veterans Claire Wong and Karen Tan endeavor to act out the roles of all 16 characters. With the play’s satirical take on Malaysian politics and a fictitious storyline about the country’s desire to build an atomic bomb, the performance is entertaining and witty to say the least, especially when you consider the play was written 15 years ago. Since Atomic Jaya is largely based on Malaysia’s heyday of expansion and development, the desire to build a bomb depicts these ambitions.

Delivering their lines with effortless comic timing was the highlight of the show, bringing on knee-slapping laughs from the audience. While skillfully weaving in and out of the various characters, they managed to keep in mind the accents and dispositions of each individual character, among which included an eccentric German uranium smuggler and a melodramatic Indian physicist.

Perhaps surprisingly, the plot is still relevant to this day and could work well due to the generally harmless rivalry between Singapore and Malaysia. We did however, wonder how our peers in Malaysia would react to the performance. In an exclusive interview with I-S magazine, Huzir Sulaiman—playwright and director of Atomic Jaya—says without hesitation, “It was written with a lot of love, and it fundamentally celebrates Malaysian-ness in all its hilarious and crazy forms.” 

source: http://is.asia-city.com/events/blog/i-spy/theater-review-atomic-jaya

THE SMELL OF LANGUAGE (1995)

Sulaiman's third theatre piece, is a postmodern play which questions the role of the author and focuses on the scandalous events in the Malaysian state of Malacca in 1995, when the Chief Minister was alleged to have raped a fourteen-year-old girl who was then taken into police custody. The grotesqueness of the misuse of power reached its peak when an opposition politician inaccurately labelled the latter incident as "imprisonment" instead of "detainment" – a choice of words which led him to be thrown into jail himself.

OCCUPATION (2002)

Occupation depicts this period through the prism of the author's own grandparents – and links the national trauma of occupation with an episode in which the grandmother falls in love with her future husband and becomes "occupied" by this love.

source: http://www.literaturfestival.com/participants/authors/2005/huzir-sulaiman