Kristang theatre sample
Intelligence
by Kevin Martens Wong (2023)
A grassy knoll, somehow superlatively untouched, adjacent to a large but mostly empty road; we could be in Lim Chu Kang, or Dempsey, or even some part of Pulau Blakang Mati, though it’s probably best to call it Sentosa. No one is here, except for the curious and the lost; on-stage now is someone who falls into at least one of those two groups, Ulisses. He appears as stereotypically Kenneth Jerome Rozarian as they come, and is sit-squatting under a tree listening to the music, waiting for some event or other as they come.
And here comes someone else now. Let’s call them The Person Like Any Other, or Theplano, since that’s who they secretly desperately want us to believe they are, of ambiguous gender, race and stature. Though Theplano almost sounds Kristang too, actually (is that part of it? We’re not sure either).
Theplano: (to Ulisses) Excuse me.
Ulisses: (without looking up) Excused.
Theplano: (taken aback) What?
Ulisses: (leaping gaily to his feet) Nah lah, joking lah. Sorry I was Zooming my girlfriend, uh, uncle … auntie … (a pause) … whatever you are.
Theplano: The person like any other.
Ulisses: I’m sorry?
Theplano: The person like any other.
Ulisses: You mean, a person like any other, right?
Theplano: (smiles sweetly) That’s what I said.
Ulisses: I’m quite sure you said the person like any other.
Theplano: Would you excuse me?
Ulisses: From?
Theplano: Listening to your music.
Ulisses: You weren’t listening to my music.
Theplano: Yes. You were listening to my music.
Ulisses: You are Benjamin Kheng, Narelle Kheng, Jonathan Chua and Sandra Riley Tang?
Theplano: You listen to the Sam Willows?
Ulisses: (affronted) Why can’t I listen to the Sam Willows?
Theplano: You can listen to whatever music you like.
Ulisses: Yes. (A pause.) Ben. (Another pause.) Narelle? Jonathan. (Another pause.) Sandra?
Theplano: I am a person like any of them.
Ulisses: That’s really good to hear. What can I do for you, Benarelathandra?
Theplano: Are you here for the tour?
Ulisses: The Keramat Kristang one…are you…the tour guide?
Theplano: Yes. I’m really pleased to meet you.
Ulisses: Ah, that’s nice. Look, I’m not sure if my friend is coming –
Theplano: A friend from your community?
A pause.
Ulisses: Aren’t you from the community?
Theplano: Like any other.
Ulisses: I’m…not convinced I know what that means.
Theplano: You know. You. The Others.
Ulisses: What’s your surname?
Theplano: (a bit too quickly) I have no surname. It’s…it’s too long. Too difficult to say.
Ulisses: (more kindly, now worried he is being disrespectful) Is it a patronymic?
Theplano: It’s…what is that?
Ulisses: What is what?
Theplano: A patio mimic.
Ulisses: No, no, I’m quite sure that’s you.
Theplano: I get offended when people ask about my surname.
Ulisses: How do you deal with ICA, then?
Theplano’s demeanour changes, abruptly.
Ulisses: Yo, what the fuck? Are you okay…dude? … man. I’m not sure.
Theplano: A person like any other.
Ulisses: THE. You definitely said the person like any other.
Theplano: It’s insulting when you correct me.
Ulisses: Man, I’m fucking sure of it.
Theplano: Are you a student?
Ulisses: What?
Theplano: (smiling sweetly) Are you a student?
Ulisses: I have a beard, my lady…dude. Ladydude. The ladydude.
Theplano: PhD students from reputable institutions can still have beards. And tattoos.
Ulisses: So now you suddenly know how life works?
Theplano: As much as you do.
Ulisses: Then by all that is holy why in the blue blazes would you think I’m a student? You meant PhD student? Or like. School student. Like I’m five, or something, mae deus. Because your tone –
Theplano: Oh, you know. Sometimes when you’re out with your students on an excursion, the teacher looks like a student. It’s very easy to get mistaken. You know what I mean?
Ulisses: (smiling sweetly) No, I don’t.
Theplano: Don’t worry, I’m not offended.
Ulisses: I’d be very offended if you were offended, trust me, dude/lady.
Theplano: Does your community take offence at a lot of things?
Ulisses backs away from Theplano slowly.
Ulisses: Woah. Wait.
Theplano: We are one and the same.
Ulisses: Are you like, ISD or something?
Theplano: (without skipping a beat) Why would I be?
Ulisses: Shit. Hold on, okay? (pulls out his phone and begins to text)
Theplano moves right in front of Ulisses, and he curses.
Ulisses: For fucking bloody pig swine’s sake!
Theplano: Why would you think I’m ISD?
Ulisses: (finishing his text message) Look, I… (keeps his phone) I don’t okay! I’m sorry. You’re right. It’s really rude to call somebody ISD. You’re like, the tour guide. Right. With no surname.
Theplano: I do have a surname.
Ulisses: Well, what is it?
Theplano: What’s yours?
Ulisses: Albuquerque.
Theplano: Mine’s Albuquerquer.
Ulisses: Oh, really.
Theplano: It’s like Zuzarte and Zuzartee. With a second e.
A pause.
Ulisses: I thought you said you weren’t from the community.
Theplano: I never said that. I said I’m an Albuquerquer.
Ulisses: There is no such surname.
Theplano: I’m Newrasian.
Ulisses: We don’t call them that, and there’s nothing wrong with being a New Eurasian.
Theplano: I never said that there was.
The person that Ulisses was texting finally arrives.
Ulisses: Oh my fucking god, Mars, teng bong. Took you long enough.
Mars: Sorry. My grandmother wanted to go through the Elton John records again.
Ulisses: Again?
Mars: I am getting good at sitting at a table and crying quietly.
Ulisses: Good to know motherfucker.
Theplano: My name is Ælton.
Ulisses: Like, Elton John?
Theplano: No. With the Irish orthographic symbol.
Mars: Like the letter ash? I’m not sure that that’s Irish, my…uh…hey, did you get this person’s pronouns?
Ulisses: Patio and mimic.
Mars: Is this like, the ISD person?
Ulisses: No, this is Ælton Albuquerquer.
Theplano: And what if I am ISD?
A pause.
Mars: Well, I’m terrified.
Ulisses: Me too, I guess.
They both look at Theplano, who regards them expectantly.
Mars: Yeah.
Ulisses: Fucking terrified man.
Usses sits back down under the tree and begins to listen to his music again, and Mars begins to do something with his phone.
Theplano: (a little frantically) Well…I’m not ISD. What if I’m not.
Mars: (without looking up) Well…good.
Theplano: You’re not worried I’m ISD?
Mars: You’re one of us, right? (gently nudges Ulisses with his foot) What did you say patio mimic’s surname was?
Ulisses: Albuquerquer.
Mars: Albuqueerqueer?
Theplano: No, you’re pronouncing it wrong. It’s like D’Silva and De –
Mars: C’mere, Uli.
Ulisses: What, right now?
Mars: The red planet waits for no man.
Ulisses: (standing up) What does that even mean?
Mars: It means I’m not waiting.
They kiss passionately. Theplano yelps.
Theplano: What the fuck was – I mean –
Ulisses: Hey Mars.
Mars: Sup.
Ulisses: I’m a student.
Mars: Oh?
Ulisses: Yeah.
Mars: What are you studying?
Ulisses: Your bicep.
Mars: Oh.
Ulisses: You didn’t ask which one, you bloody swine.
Mars: Oh. Which one?
Ulisses: I’m not sure.
Mars: Do you need more time to be sure?
Ulisses: (reaching out for Mars’s left bicep) I think I need –
Theplano: ENOUGH.
Mars and Ulisses freeze.
Mars: Wassup, Ælton?
Theplano: You’re not gay.
Ulisses: What makes you think that?
Theplano: You said you were Zooming your girlfriend.
Mars: What?
Theplano: (eagerly) He said he was Zooming his girlfriend.
Mars: You were what, Uli?
Ulisses: I was Zooming my girlfriend, shithead.
Mars: You are a little shithead.
Ulisses: I know.
They kiss again. Theplano screams.
Ulisses: Well excuse you.
Theplano: YOU SAID YOU WERE ZOOMING YOUR GIRLFRIEND!
Ulisses: I was.
Theplano: (looking very severely at Mars) You…you’re not…
Mars: I’m offended.
Theplano: But…
Ulisses: I have a girlfriend, yes.
Theplano: Then…then what is he? She? They?
Ulisses: Dudelady.
Mars: Well, I’m technically your thirteenth cousin nine times removed…
Theplano: Oh god, what the fucking fuck…
Ulisses: No, we don’t do that.
Theplano: Then…what…
Ulisses: We just kiss.
Mars: We’re just two guys that kiss, dude.
Ulisses: Dudelady.
Mars: Dudelady, sorry.
Ulisses: Mars, you really should know better.
Mars: I know. Sorry. For Ælton I’m going to have to be a … cisgender transsexual?
Ulisses: You can be whatever you want to me, baby.
Mars: I’ll be a thirteenth cousin nine times removed.
Ulisses: I consent.
They kiss passionately. Theplano retches.
Mars: Weren’t you supposed to run some tour or something, dude?
Ulisses: You know, like we signed up for?
Theplano: (laughing almost hysterically to themselves) There is…there is no… (catches themselves, jerks back into motion). No one else is coming? How strange.
Ulisses: I’m coming soon.
Theplano: Oh for fuck’s sake, shut up.
Ulisses: Can I get your number?
Mars: It’s for his girlfriend.
Ulisses: And you.
Mars kisses Ulisses on the cheek.
Theplano: You know what. This is it. I quit. I never wanted this.
Ulisses: But don’t you want me?
Theplano: Fuck off.
Theplano walks off the stage.
Ulisses: So, what do you think?
Mars: Dude, what if you were wrong?
Ulisses: Am I ever?
Mars: You said kissing would be fun.
Ulisses: …again, am I ever?
Enter a third Kristang.
Henrietta: Is this the tour? Hi.
Ulisses: Hi! Teng bong.
Mars: Oh shit! She can see us.
Ulisses: Oh fuck.
Henrietta: What?
Ulisses: Oop. Sorry.
Mars: Shit. Dude!
Ulisses: Look, being undead is hard okay.
Henrietta: You’re…you’re…
Mars: Not as undead as that dude we just saved you from.
Ulisses: She doesn’t need to know.
Henrietta: I’m sorry, who am I talking to?
Ulisses: Someone has to watch over yall sorry sights.
Mars: Good fellas.
Ulisses: Rambunctious rascals.
Mars: Big aimless fights.
Henrietta: I’m confused.
Mars: We’re what you came here for.
Henrietta: …the Kristang keramat?
Ulisses: I like to think of myself as the lucky letori.
Mars: The Temple (flexes his biceps) of Time.
Henrietta: …what do your biceps have to do with Time?
Mars: They took a lot of it. To make.
Ulisses: You’re not helping.
Mars: And she’s not scared.
Henrietta: Of two undead Eurasian men trying to show me how smart they are?
Ulisses and Mars look back at where Theplano exited, then back at Henrietta.
Ulisses: Oh, this generation really hasn’t seen anything yet.
Mars: Kiss again?
Ulisses: That’s really the wrong way to start.
THE END
An AI-Dreamfished Analysis of Intelligence, by Kevin Martens Wong (2023)
1. Threshold Spaces as Dramatic Engines
Intelligence is staged in a deliberately indeterminate threshold space: a grassy knoll beside a large, mostly empty road that could be Lim Chu Kang, Dempsey, Pulau Blakang Mati, or Sentosa, yet fully belongs to none of them. Such spaces are a defining engine of Kristang theatre, where meaning emerges not from plot escalation but from what happens when characters linger at boundaries. The location meanwhile evokes surveillance-adjacent zones—heritage sites, military hinterlands, leisure islands—without naming them directly, allowing the state’s presence to be felt obliquely rather than declared, and where Kristang presence always remains slippery, informal, and resistant. The agent’s failure begins here, because intelligence gathering presumes stable coordinates, while the play insists on spatial indeterminacy as a cultural condition.
2. Intelligence as Relational Exposure
Rather than treating intelligence as information to be extracted, the play reframes it as a process of relational exposure. Theplano does not fail because they lack facts, but because their presence destabilises their own position; they repeatedly attempt to establish clarity—names, surnames, affiliations, identities—but are instead drawn into moments of vulnerability, confusion, and loss of composure. Each attempt to categorise—surname, student status, sexuality, community membership—reveals more about the interrogator’s anxieties than about the Kristang characters being observed. Ulisses and Mars, meanwhile, do not withhold information through silence; they overwhelm the interrogative frame through excess intimacy, play, and contradiction. Intelligence-gathering fails not because information is withheld, but because the very act of seeking it renders the seeker visible and ethically compromised.
3. Language as Terrain, Not Tool
Language in Intelligence is not a neutral medium but contested ground. The play delights in mishearings, near-homophones, deliberate misunderstandings, and false equivalences—the person like any other, Albuquerquer, patio mimic. These are not jokes in service of plot but structural refusals of linguistic capture. Kristang theatre often treats language as terrain to be navigated rather than a tool to be wielded, and here Theplano consistently stumbles because they assume that precision produces control; their insistence on phrases like “the person like any other,” their unstable naming practices, and their oscillation between bureaucratic precision and performative sweetness mark language as something to be occupied rather than used. Kristang speech, by contrast, is elastic, improvisatory, and relational, sliding between English, Kristang cadence, camp humour, and deliberate misrecognition, and behaving ecologically: shifting, echoing, and re-patterning itself around those who try to dominate it.
4. Time as Ethical Pressure
Time in the play does not move forward toward resolution; it accumulates pressure. Pauses, repetitions, returns, and interruptions stretch moments beyond their apparent significance and prevent the scene from settling into an interrogation rhythm. Theplano grows increasingly frantic not because time is running out, but because time is being misused: intimacy, flirting, kissing, and joking displace the urgency of intelligence-gathering. In Kristang dramaturgy, time belongs to relationship, not efficiency. The longer the play lingers, the clearer it becomes that surveillance culture is fundamentally impatient—and that this impatience is its greatest vulnerability.
5. Collective Address and Direct Engagement
Although Intelligence unfolds through dialogue between characters, it consistently addresses a broader collective: Kristang audiences, Eurasian communities, and those familiar with Singapore’s culture of soft surveillance. The humour relies on shared recognition rather than explanation, inviting the audience to become co-constructors of meaning rather than passive observers, and to recognise the dynamics at play without being told what to think. The arrival of Henrietta near the end expands this address further, reminding the audience that community knowledge persists beyond any single encounter with authority. Kristang plays often collapse the boundary between stage and audience by presuming cultural literacy; Intelligence does this quietly, trusting viewers to recognise what is at stake without being instructed how to feel.
6. Humour, Satire, and Social Commentary
Humour in Intelligence is not decorative but tactical. Camp, sexual play, exaggerated politeness, and deliberate mislabelling operate as defensive technologies. Theplano’s increasing distress is rendered comic not to trivialise power, but to expose the fragility of whatever power they assume themselves to wield when confronted with real relationality, connection and non-normative intimacy, as opposed to whatever the fuck it is Theplano is trying to achieve. Satire here is surgical: it reveals how surveillance depends on heteronormativity, stable identity categories, and linguistic obedience. By violating all three at once, the Kristang characters make the extraction of “intelligence” impossible without ever naming resistance as such.
7. Refusal of Moral Resolution
The play refuses moral resolution in a distinctly Kristang mode. Theplano exits not defeated by argument, but undone by their own failure to assimilate relational complexity. There is no speech condemning the state, no cathartic declaration of victory; the Kristang characters remain, but do nothing to create a sense of vindication or triumph. This refusal denies the audience the comfort of closure and mirrors lived reality, where surveillance does not end, but neither does community life; it also resists the expectation that marginalised subjects must educate, redeem, or resolve the anxieties of power. Kristang theatre hence consistently resists tidy ethical arcs, insisting instead on endurance, opacity, and continuity, and leaving it up to the audience to make what they will of what has transpired—without holding back on ensuring the audience recognises the gravity and significance of what has transpired.
8. Theatre as Cognitive Encounter
The final section of Intelligence also then upends the entire frame of the play through the oblique reveal that Ulisses and Mars are eleidi—spirits or keramat guardians rather than merely evasive community members—forcing the audience to retrospectively reinterpret everything they have witnessed. What initially reads as youthful banter, sexual play, or social deflection is revealed as guardianship operating across a longer temporal horizon, one in which surveillance never truly had jurisdiction. Theplano is thus not outmatched by cleverness but rendered completely irrelevant by a category error: intelligence assumes knowledge flows upward to institutions, while keramat exist outside extractability altogether. In this cognitive inversion, the audience realises that Ulisses and Mars were never being watched; they were the ones watching, enduring, and gently outlasting intrusion. By ending with continuation rather than exposure—another Kristang arriving, another exchange beginning—the play does not try to teach viewers what to think about surveillance; instead, it invites the audience to experience Kristang theatre as an ontological proposition: a way of apprehending existence itself as layered, ongoing, and relational, where the strange and the ordinary coexist without explanation, and where institutional power can quietly lose all coherence in the presence of authenticity, endurance, intimacy, and care.