Singapore's Discomfort Zone

From their digs in a row house in Singapore's historic Little India, W!ld Rice founding director Ivan Heng and his team are plotting their next provocation. On Aug. 6, the theater troupe will open its second Singapore Theatre Festival, a biannual event launched in 2006 to coincide with the city-state's national-day celebrations, where they plan to "make public a lot of conversations we've been having in private," says Heng. Those conversations touch on race, sexuality and even politics—topics censors sanitize in Singapore's newspapers, films and television programming.

Local playwrights, directors and actors have earned the city a strong reputation for edgy stagecraft, and helped create an arts culture that stands out in Southeast Asia for its vibrancy. Part of the appeal is Singapore's status as the region's political, religious and cultural crossroads-a nexus that informs many of the stage plays set to premiere at the festival this month. Theater's non-mainstream status also affords it more space for expression compared with other mass media, and censorship guidelines, points out Amy Chua, the director for media content at the Media Authority Development, have evolved over the years in tandem with the community's standards.

Heng and three other leading lights of the festival recently sat down with NEWSWEEK's George Wehrfritz and Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop to discuss the evolving theater scene. Heng, a lawyer by training, is an acclaimed actor and director. Eleanor Wong is a legal scholar when she's not writing plays. Ken Kwek is a former political reporter for the Singapore Straits Times, the main local English newspaper. Alfian Sa'at is a poet and writer. Three of them have worked in the occasionally embattled Singapore theater business since it first took off, and their dynamic discussion reflects that story, quite a drama in itself. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: Singapore has gone on the branding offensive to cast itself as a hip, happening and increasingly open city. How has that been expressed in theater?
Ivan Heng: Eleanor and myself started in the late '80s …

Eleanor Wong: The year I recall is 1985. A short-play competition identified a few people, and from there things started happening.

Heng: The idea of indigenous Singaporean theater was magnetic, and brought so many people to the theater …