Wild Rice’s G*d Is A Woman plays complaint culture and letter writing campaigns for farce

SINGAPORE – Tickets to Wild Rice’s upcoming satire G*d Is A Woman were already on sale when all transactions had to be paused.

The script about censorship and complaint culture, submitted to the authorities in April, required some discussions with the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA).

Wild Rice founding artistic director Ivan Heng says of the weeks-long negotiations: “The play is intact. We got our licence to perform.

“Funnily, the concerns were about how certain factions might be offended by this work. Our position was that it’s a satire that uses humour to point out and skewer our human foibles and idiosyncrasies. It’s a curious case of life imitating art and, thankfully, IMDA was convinced.”

Directed by Heng, 59, and written by Joel Tan, 36, the R18 play sees a coterie of frustrated artists start a fake petition to cancel American pop singer Ariana Grande, only to have their manufactured concerns taken seriously by segments of conservative society.

The resulting “shady” backroom negotiations take centre stage and are played partially for farce, with Tan and Heng keeping elements of the plot close to their chest.

During rehearsals, actors Munah Bagharib and Brendon Fernandez – half of a quartet of actors – are on all fours oinking lustily as pigs. “That’s the whole play,” Tan jokes on the sidelines.

God Is A Woman is the title of Grande’s pop/hip-hop hybrid track released in 2018, and Tan says he found in it a ridiculous but “believable margin of offend-ability” for his premise.

He crafted the play out of indignation at the lowering threshold for offence he has observed in the past few years. A particular catalyst was the cancelling of two performances in the 2017 M1 Fringe Fest that had initially been greenlit – Naked Ladies by Canadian performer Thea Fitz-James and Undressing Room by Singaporean movement artist Ming Poon, which were the subjects of a vehement and eventually successful letter-writing campaign that protested against nudity.

Tan recalls: “I remember feeling this profound sense of injustice that these people who were not elected to be policymakers had this kind of executive power, and I was disturbed by it as a fundamentally undemocratic practice.”

Complaints can be effectively weaponised to make middle management and policymakers anxious, he adds. “There’s a sense that the arts – and everything else – is governed by the anxiety of middle managers, who feel they need to be super accountable to the public.

“When someone complains, someone’s registering discontent about something. And then you multiply that by a factor of 10,000. That can look very scary to the middle managers and, over the years, they become very adept at sniffing out something that is potentially offensive and making sure it doesn’t happen.”

Wild Rice’s plays have been the target of censure. When the company staged Oscar Wilde’s The Importance Of Being Earnest (2020), two people sat in the front row with their Bibles open and slammed them shut when the actors came on stage as a form of silent protest.

A Teochew grandmother swearing in Thomas Lim’s Grandmother Tongue (2021) ruffled some feathers, and some members of the audience were upset at the pantomime Cinderel-lah! (2010), when the stepsisters used an iron to burn the unfortunate girl.

“We do reply to the letters. We say this is not every grandmother and not every Teochew. It’s a character,” Heng says. “The Cinderel-lah! scene was done like a Tom And Jerry cartoon and, second, don’t you talk to your children? Don’t you see this as a learning opportunity for you and your child to go out and say, ‘This is not the way we treat our maids’?”

But Heng says he much prefers having this circular to-and-fro with the public than have the authorities feel the necessity to safeguard outrage. “That has always been our position. We are willing to deal with it. We’ll take it as it comes – one letter at a time, one complaint at a time.”

The play is also unexpectedly prescient in focusing on Grande, given the recent slew of big acts such as Coldplay and Taylor Swift opting to play extended tours here over other countries in South-east Asia.

Singapore has a track record of strict rules for live music acts. Madonna was not allowed to perform religiously sensitive songs such as Holy Water during her first-ever concert here in 2016. Adam Lambert’s appearance at Mediacorp’s New Year’s Eve concert in 2015 sparked a petition drama. In the 1970s, Kitaro and Led Zeppelin were also banned from playing here during Singapore’s anti-long hair campaign.

Asked if there is a comparison to be drawn with Malaysia’s recent

cancelling of the Good Vibes music festival in Kuala Lumpur

after The 1975 frontman Matty Healy criticised the Malaysian government’s anti-LGBTQ laws and kissed bassist Ross MacDonald on stage, Tan says: “No, this play is not about competing cultures of receiving pop concerts.”

He adds, though, that he finds it interesting that these concerts have become a proxy for people to negotiate what they feel should be the country’s values system.

“We somehow project something onto them. We still labour under this imaginary idea that there is a set of Asian values that we need to safeguard and be vigilant about, but I’m not sure how much of that is true.”

As G*d Is A Woman prepares to open, Heng’s appeal to the audience is simple. “We don’t often have the time to sit with a piece of art and to think and wait before you respond. That’s what theatre does, to gift us this safe space. G*d Is A Woman talks about something very relatable. It’s sharp, incisive and exposes the fact that offence is very rarely given, but usually taken.”

Book It/G*d Is A Woman

Where: Wild Rice@Funan, Level 4, 107 North Bridge Road
When: Sept 8, 7.30pm; Sept 9, 2.30 and 7.30pm; Sept 10 to 23, Tuesdays to Thursdays (7.30pm), Fridays (7.30pm), Saturdays (2.30 and 7.30pm), Sundays (2.30pm)
Admission: From $25
Info: 

str.sg/iS8B