Reflections on freedom and values in Singapore while a love triangle goes awry in Chong An Ong’s professional debut.

One’s varsity years are often looked back on as the halcyon days of their lives, a time of freedom, of exploration and self-discovery, allowing you to realise who you are and what you want with little to no restrictions. But come graduation year, and there’s a sudden burst of panic, the very real fear of rapidly approaching adulthood and entering the ‘real world’, everyone going their own separate paths and leaving the student life behind forever.

That is the crux of new playwright Chong An Ong’s debut play, with the premiere of Singapore, Michigan by Pangdemonium. Directed by Timothy Koh, Singapore, Michigan has a promising premise, as three university friends go on a road trip together. The destination? The rather unexpected and very niche ghost town of Singapore, Michigan in northeastern USA. Inspired by Ong’s own real life experiences as a government scholar studying in the USA, Singapore, Michigan has a clear structure and familiar dramatic beats, typical of a debut playwright still finding his own voice.

Singapore, Michigan sees Pangdemonium attempting to incorporate new technology to make the play look visually-impressive. This is apparent right from the beginning, where the play opens with the three friends on the road, driving a working ‘car’ that appears to be moving onto the stage by itself. The structure tries to toe the line between immersion and practicality, but while it’s interesting that we’re seeing such mechanics displayed on the Singapore stage, the car itself, devoid of a roof and doors, is quite a jarring image that feels at odds with the attempt at realism. This, alongside details such as how characters persist in wearing jackets in the car even after hours of driving, briefly pull more observant viewers out of the illusion.

The opening scene is effective at quickly establishing the characters’ relationships and personalities – there’s smart aleck Manish (Shrey Bhargava), who rattles off an entire history of Singapore, Michigan when asked, clearly in love with being respected for his intelligence and wit, and thinks he’s in charge. Then there’s his girlfriend, fellow Singaporean Carol (Shu Yi Ching) in the driver’s seat beside him, doing her best to take charge despite her lack of experience on the roads. And finally, the only American in the bunch, Jesse (Zane Haney), sitting in the back, loud and constantly joking, and quite literally coming between both Manish and Carol.

What starts out as a fun, sprawling adventure quickly turns into a closed room drama, as the weather takes a turn for the worse and cuts the trip short. Caught in a blizzard, the three friends are forced to take up shelter at a motel and abandon their original plans, where cabin fever takes over, and the true drama unfolds. The transition to Eucien Chia’s motel set is relatively smooth, but while the set is beautiful as always, seems to reflect the conditions of a much nicer, more expensive location than a roadside motel the three are putting up with. It’s somehow too clean and pristine, the sheets too modern, and almost lengthened to suit the long stage at the Singapore Airlines Theatre, rather that capture the almost claustrophobic atmosphere the play seems to want to create, spreading out the actors across the space and reducing the tension.

In terms of the development of the individual characters and their relationships however, Singapore, Michigan doesn’t manage to fully tap into the emotional potential of its characters and their relationships. The play is organised in a way where each character gets to interact with another in very clearly divided segments – Jesse and Carol, Jesse and Manish, Manish and Carol, before all three come together and duke out their differences and all their secrets come to light. All too convenient phone calls and spur of the moment decisions trigger the next pair, and eventually feels repetitive and expected, complete with a lengthy blackout between each scene that makes it even clearer how deliberately segmented it is. In addition, with every reveal, the characters only seem to sink further into their own quicksand of drama, a steady stream of emotional blows that weigh heavily on the narrative, leaving little room for a breather.

The issues Ong brings up are relatively reasonable for his characters and their lives. At the heart of it is Carol, who is torn between the obligation of returning home to take over her parents’ highly profitable fossil fuel company and wanting to rebel against it by taking on a directly opposing environmental studies role in America, and paralleled in her being torn between both Manish and Jesse. Manish reveals himself to be far too controlling and exacting, believing so thoroughly in the blueprint he’s planned out that he becomes blind and deaf to Carol’s own wants and needs, offhandedly criticising and putting down America as a land of the lawless, weighed down by his own burden of responsibility to his government scholarship. And Jesse, with an English BA, is seen as someone free from responsibility and choice, a player who doesn’t see the very real sense of obligation both Manish and Carol are facing, and constantly interferes with their conflict, as one might see as an issue of American exceptionalism. The fact that all three of them have a choice to begin with is what fuels the drama, alongside the fact that each of them keep secrets from each other that eventually causes it all to blow up, and while all of these issues and problems ultimately feel internal and emotionally fraught, their relatively low-stakes nature may be hard to connect with for some viewers.

Ong’s writing is deliberate and intentional, where every interaction and line serves a symbolic purpose. When the trio initially bond over ghost stories while eating cold Chinese takeout, each of their stories represents something innate to their own fears and hints at their backstories later on, such as Carol’s nightmare featuring men in corporate suits and sinking into an inky black pond. The central metaphor of Singapore, Michigan is also made clear early on, where it almost seems like a bizarro version of Singapore that sunk into the sand rather than finding the success of its namesake, a desperation to reach this place as the last vestige of the Singaporeans’ time in America, the last days of their youthful innocence before it all disappears from their line of sight.

There are times individual actors’ performances shine through – Shrey’s monologue about facing racism, or seeing his mother stay up to wait for him studying in school tugs at the heartstrings, while Zane’s steadfast conviction in his voice and physicality that he’s in the right makes you see these characters. But when characters actually interact, there is a distinct lack of onstage chemistry that makes it hard to really care about the plight of these young adults navigating their privilege, but whose struggles may feel distant or unrelatable to some. Their disagreements also tend to slip into melodrama, with emotional exchanges that occasionally lose their grounding.

That is felt especially in the final scene, where all three of them come to a head, and in a rapid fire deterioration of relationships, all comes to light in a shouting match, to the extent that blows are exchanged in a climactic fight scene that struggles with believability, which slightly undercuts the emotional stakes at a crucial moment. Even worse is how the entire play ends abruptly, as if it doesn’t know how it wants to end, with a an ambiguous ending that feels unresolved, with few tangible consequences for the characters’ choices. Ambiguity isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but in this case, there is something deeply unsatisfactory about the way the entire show concludes at its highest point of tension, with Carol leaving on what seems to be a death wish, the two men silent, not even trying to go after her.

Ong is clearly wrestling with weighty themes: the burden of national expectations, the seductive freedoms of the West, and the messy entanglements of youth unmoored from home. Championing new works is never a crime, and under Pangdemonium’s support, Ong’s professional debut is an opportunity he should savour, and forms the foundation for which he may continue to develop and write more scripts. And for what it’s worth, Ong has given shape to a kind of emotional exile, felt not just in a snowy ghost town across the world, but within the hearts of those who are trying to decide what it means to be Singaporean in a world where the map, and the mission, is no longer so clear.

Photo Credit: Pangdemonium

Singapore, Michigan plays from 26th June to 11th July 2025 at the Singapore Airlines Theatre @ Lasalle College of Arts. Tickets and more information available here

Production Credits:

Director Timothy Koh Playwright Chong An Ong Cast Ching Shu Yi, Shrey Bhargava, Zane Haney Set Designer Eucien Chia Lighting Designer James Tan Sound Designer Daniel Wong Costume Designer Leonard Augustine Choo