Vietnam's femaledramatists

Entry for March 23, 2008
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The Supermuses of Stage and Screen: Vietnam's Female Dramatists

Catherine Diamond
Figures

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According to Catherine Diamond's survey, Vietnam's contemporary theatre has an unusually large number of women participating in playwriting and directing. Several, as well as performing, are involved in both. Moreover, the plays being presented in the two largest cities, Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, have female characters dominating the stage. The women dramatists exert an unusual amount of creative control in the theatre. Some work in close collaboration with male colleagues or have spouses in the theatre; others have been at odds with male management and prefer to work with other women artists. The predominance of successful women playwrights and directors may be the result of several factors: the centuries old tradition of female-oriented theatre; the recent activities of women in military theatre troupes; the Communist Party's attempts to legislate equality in a society with lingering feudalistic attitudes; and women's transmission of family traditions in theatre.

Catherine Diamond is a professor of theatre in Taiwan, where she is a director with Thalie Theatre, Taiwan's only English-language troupe. Also a dancer, she has published several times in ATJ and has written fictional accounts of dancers in Asia in Sringara Tales.
Backstage the actors of a cai luong troupe--southern Vietnam's musical theatre--are in a panic. Their leading man has become a famous star and deserted the company for more lucrative television contracts, leaving them to face his angry fans. The only one who can rescue them now is his diligent and devoted, though mediocre, understudy. After getting a pep talk from his elderly mentor, the understudy dresses and goes out to face the unruly crowd. The actors hold their breath. There is a moment of calm; hesitant smiles appear; then the catcalls erupt and the crestfallen understudy flees backstage. So begins The Solitary Flight (Bai tren co dan, 1996), a play by Ai Nhu, actress/ playwright/director in Ho Chi Minh City's contemporary theatre. [End Page 268]

Ai Nhu is one of Vietnam's several multitalented female dramatists. Almost half of the plays showing in Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi in 1997-1998 were either written or directed by women. That such a high proportion of women are in creative control of the theatre is rare not only in Southeast Asia but in much of the rest of the world as well. These women, however, have little in common except their commitment to theatre. Some come from artistic families; some have had to fight parental disapproval to pursue their careers. Some are single, some divorced, some happily married. Some belong to the Communist Party and are supported by the state; others are not only not party members but have wary relations with the government.

Although all openly admit to the inequalities between men and women--and the pervasive double standard in Vietnamese society, in which polygamy is still common--there is no consensus among them that they have faced particular discrimination in their careers. Nor have they all formed exclusively female bonds. Some of them have collaborated with each other on several productions and created good working relationships that sustain them through the inevitable difficulties; others have established a similar close rapport with male colleagues. [End Page 269]

Moreover, their work could only with difficulty be labeled "feminist"--if feminism means a self-conscious awareness of being excluded from prevailing (male) determinants of cultural, social, sexual, political, and intellectual life and involves a critique of such conditions. Of the rhetorical devices found in feminist plays written by European and American playwrights--such as the reversal of sex roles to expose double standards otherwise accepted as normal; the presentation of historical figures as role models; satire of traditional sex roles; and the portrayal of women in situations oppressive due to their gender--only the latter device is employed with any regularity. Thus, aside from their perseverance and talent, Vietnamese women actor/director/playwrights do not have an easily discernible common denominator to explain their success. Instead, they must be considered as individual multifaceted artists, each contributing to the general theatrical milieu in which they work, though their collective presence also influences the nature of that context.


Ho Chi Minh City Dramatists
Ai Nhu, like her Ho Chi Minh City colleagues Hoa Ha, Tram Huong, and Nguyen Thi Minh Ngoc, attended the College of Film and Theatre's directing program. Now in her mid-thirties, she defied her mother and did not follow her family to the United States. She has appeared in over forty productions, written ten produced plays and directed fifteen, but her mother, still unimpressed, continues to urge her to get out of theatre.

After Ai Nhu graduated in 1991, she was accepted by the Cau Lac Bo San Khau The Nghiem (The Nghiem Theatre Club)--the premiere theatre company in Ho Chi Minh City for experimental drama. It does not have a stage but presents its productions in a large hall with 240 movable seats. Actors perform on movable platforms with little or no stage scenery. Directors must accommodate the popular actors' film and television schedules, and production budgets are very small, averaging $100, but performances are often sold out and run on a rotating basis for years. The Solitary Flight has been showing since 1997, and Tinh 281, a comedy in which Ai Nhu was concurrently acting, has been appearing since 1995.

Like many contemporary Vietnamese plays, Tinh 281, written by the male playwright Minh Hoang, has two plots that are linked tenuously and then come together at the end. The number 281 is the paging number in Ho Chi Minh City, and in the first plot a man and woman answering marriage ads carry on their courtship and are overheard by the operator. The second plot concerns a famous but poor writer and his unhappy wife who keeps leaving him. Their young [End Page 270] daughter seeks solace through a friendship with the telephone operator who, in the end, facilitates the reunion of the suicidal writer and his wife. The two lovers finally meet, discovering that although they are nothing like what they had been fantasizing--the woman is very large and the man very small--they are compatible enough. Ai Nhu, an accomplished comic actress, performs the discontented wife; her fourteen-year-old daughter had been appearing as the girl until it was decided at the end of 1997 that she had grown too tall for the part.

For Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, the theatre troupes in Ho Chi Minh City prepare happy plays. Ai Nhu was selected by Thanh Hoang to direct his new play Betel Nut (Trau cau, 1997). Working around the clock to have the play ready in time, Ai Nhu rehearsed the five women and one man, Thanh Hoi, her longtime colleague who regularly appears in her own plays and has helped her cowrite some of them.

Betel Nut, like Tinh 281, is a comic play with a double plot. The subplot involves a widow loved by her former husband's brother, but the primary plot concerns her daughter who wants to marry a foreigner but fears her betel-chewing grandmother will make a bad impression on him. Elaborate plans are created to keep them from meeting, until the grandmother, realizing she is being tricked, reveals why she chews betel. As a young woman during the 1945 War of Independence against the French, she was pursued by French soldiers. Knowing that betel, which leaves the mouth looking bloody, repulsed [End Page 271] them, she chewed it to protect herself. Her granddaughter, full of remorse, accepts her betel-chewing grandmother, who then says she will give it up. Betel Nut exemplifies a trend in many current plays: to instruct the younger generation about the suffering of older people. Those born after the departure of the American military in 1975 have little knowledge of their parents' and grandparents' struggles. Lest all the sacrifices be forgotten or that the young people grow ashamed of what they perceive as backward habits, moving stories are told to inform and remind.

While performing and directing, Ai Nhu is also writing a new play. She says the greatest drawback to her multiple responsibilities is the threat to her health. She gets sick with anxiety about getting shows ready on time. Aside from caring for her two children, Ai Nhu also helps her brother run a photography studio, but she is unusually lucky in that she has a husband who supports her career.

Director Hoa Ha has not been so fortunate. Responding to a former boyfriend's claim that a woman could not amass a fortune by herself and sustain a career, she has become not only a shrewd and wealthy businesswoman, but also a successful director of both modern drama and cai luong. Having argued with the male management at the The Nghiem Theatre Club, she now works at a new theatre, the French-affiliated IDECAF. IDECAF has become a rival theatre to The Nghiem, though many of the same actors and directors work in both places. IDECAF has a small proscenium stage with 320 fixed seats, which makes it suitable for realistic dramas but less flexible for experimental works.

Although she has appeared as a cai luong actress, Hoa Ha is primarily a director who works closely with two women: playwright/director/actress Nguyen Thi Minh Ngoc and the well-known actress Phuong Hong Thuy. These two often help her conduct rehearsals because she is busy with her many business affairs. Her erratic schedule is endured, however, because she is a respected director and often uses her money to support productions.

In 1996, she directed two versions of The House with No Men (Ngoi nha khong co dan ong, by Ngoc Linh, 1993). Resembling a comic version of The House of Bernarda Alba, it centers on a woman who oppresses her three grown daughters because her husband fled on a boat with another woman. Since then she has accepted no man for herself or her daughters. The eldest, played by Ai Nhu, is a flirt whose double entendres keep the audience in stitches. When the youngest, who has a boyfriend on the sly, discovers she is pregnant, she flees with the impoverished man. When a son is born, the sisters are frantic about their mother's reaction but finally she accepts her grandson. [End Page 272] Aside from being a witty popular comedy, the play allegorizes the lingering prejudices and animosities of the postwar years and the hope of reconcilement in the future through the birth of the grandson. Hoa Ha had the script adapted for cai luong and what was a comedy became a sentimental melodrama augmented with melancholy songs. Hoa Ha herself played one of the daughters and Minh Ngoc played the mother's unmarried sister in both productions.

In December 1997, Hoa Ha adapted and directed a Vietnamese version of the Chinese novel Raise the Red Lantern (Den long do cao cao), which was presented at IDECAF. Made into a well-known film by Zhang Yimou, it tells of the horrifying lives of the wives in a rich man's household. Performed under a harsh red light and with bombastic music, the Vietnamese production was played more for its melodramatic excesses than as a critical exploration of a soul-destroying system. Local reviewers, however, criticized Hoa Ha's textual adaptation but praised the overall production. While all of these productions have female characters dominating the stage, they purport no unified message. The cruelty endured by the wives in Raise the Red Lantern suggests nothing new to a society in which it is generally accepted that a woman's lot is to suffer. [End Page 273]

While Raise the Red Lantern was playing to full houses, Hoa Ha was directing a modern drama, The Virtuous Woman (Nguoi dan ba duc hanh), written by Minh Ngoc for Saigon's three-hundredth anniversary in 1998. ("Saigon" is still used to refer to the older central part of Ho Chi Minh City.) The drama stars one of Vietnam's most beloved performers, Hong Van, who plays a cai luong actress in the 1940s, the golden age of cai luong. The beautiful actress must negotiate her personal and professional life between her jealous journalist husband and a French officer who is pursuing her. Inside a play-within-a-play structure, the actress prepares for a new role by visiting a mental asylum. There she befriends an inmate who turns out to be the personification of the Audience. Thus, while set in the 1940s and featuring a four-women chorus and a flute-and-drum accompaniment to recreate and revive the best of traditional cai luong, The Virtuous Woman is a period piece presented in an entirely new and abstract structure. Hoa Ha herself, perhaps even more than the plays she directs, provides an inspiring model for other women in theatre. Unmarried with an adopted son, she is widely traveled. Her friends like to say that in 1985 she had nothing but two empty hands; in 1998, in addition to her business and theatre interests, she plans to open Ho Chi Minh City's first bookstore cafe. [End Page 274]

Her friend and colleague, Nguyen Thi Minh Ngoc, is one of Ho Chi Minh City's most prolific writers and among the most active stage practitioners. Unmarried at forty-five and daughter of a cai luong actress, Minh Ngoc not only writes plays for both theatres in the city but also writes short plays for schools and factories as well as novels, stories, and film scripts. In addition to The Virtuous Woman, she submitted another new play for the Saigon 300 Festival based on the life and times of the revolutionary hero of the south, Nguyen An Ninh.

Minh Ngoc--while acting two character roles in Raise the Red Lantern, directing her student cai luong troupe that travels out every night to perform in the countryside, assisting Hoa Ha in directing The Virtuous Woman--was also serving as an adviser in the filming of her script Sea Moon (Hai Nguyet) being shot at a unique old house on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City. Sea Moon is a girl who lives with three generations of her family in the old family mansion until 1975. The family, grown rich from making fish sauce, flees with the fall (liberation) of Saigon, but the girl remains. As the years pass without communication, the family assumes she has died, but one day the grandmother, tasting the family fish sauce, claims Sea Moon is alive. When the father returns to Vietnam to bury the grandmother accompanied by a daughter of another wife, he meets the girl who stayed behind. They all participate in the burial ceremony, but Sea Moon does not rejoin them and remains in the family house.

In September 1997, Minh Ngoc went to the Brussels Cultural Center in Paris. There she performed in a French/Vietnamese collaborative play, Encore, or Emma's Time, about a girl with a French father and Vietnamese mother who goes back to visit her mother's hometown, Hue, for the first time. Minh Ngoc played the aunt in Hue, using the appropriate central Vietnamese dialect. On the same occasion, a French/Vietnamese actress, Suzy Lorraine, presented Minh Ngoc's play Beyond the Truth. This monodrama, set in the twenty-first century, depicts an elderly actress reminiscing about her former loves for a reporter. Alone, she speaks into a cassette recorder, responding to the questions he left on her message machine.

The personal histories of Minh Ngoc's characters often coincide with Vietnam's turbulent national history. Whatever the women's dreams or strivings, political upheavals impinge on their public actions and their private psyches. In addition, like Ai Nhu's A Solitary Flight, many of Minh Ngoc's scripts feature actors in the lead roles--as if the theatre served as an artistic microcosm, a distillation of the social/political world beyond her control. Southern playwrights, both men and women, frequently feature cai luong performers in their plays. For not only were traditional performers much beloved, but [End Page 275] their appearance now represents a certain nostalgia for a culture severely challenged from many directions. Also, like Ai Nhu, Minh Ngoc rejected opportunities to leave the country, insisting that it is the wellspring of all her writing. She has translated The Visit, D¨urrenmatt's play about a rich woman who returns to her village to exact revenge against a man who jilted her. With promises of riches, she is able to coerce the whole town into sacrificing him. Minh Ngoc has adapted it to Vietnam and the situation of returning Viet Kieu, the wealthy overseas Vietnamese. In 1998, she was also directing The Golden Age, by one of Australia's foremost playwrights, Louis Nowra.

Although she has been writing since 1976, none of her plays has completely satisfied her. The Stone Wife (Hon vong phu), which was also made into a cai luong, was her most financially successful play, but her works have won more critical acclaim than financial reward. As the best actors are overcommitted, she spends a great deal of time waiting for them to show up at rehearsals. She laughingly suggests she is being punished for some crime in her former life, but she doesn't let the time go to waste: she simply writes another scene in the interim. Minh Ngoc's greatest frustration is having to rewrite scripts for government officials or for the actors. There are three claims on a playwright she says: to aspire to one's own highest artistic standard; to please the audience; and to pass the censors. One can accomplish two but never all three.

Her friend Tram Huong, a younger woman in her thirties, writes primarily for television and film. The only writer in her family, Tram Huong was much influenced by her mother in learning about Vietnamese traditions and customs. She studied engineering but it was while working as an editor for a Ho Chi Minh City magazine that she taught herself writing. Only in 1996 did she enroll in the theatre college's directing program from which the others have graduated. She decided to attend since she felt so much frustration when directors and actors changed her scripts. She wants to have complete creative control from beginning to end.

Her most famous work to date has been the television play The Spy Woman (Nguoi dep tay do, 1994). Its heroine is forced into a loveless marriage with a rich man. After ten years in the wealthy household, she decides to assist in the war effort against the French. She agrees to seduce a Vietnamese officer working for the French army to pry him away, but instead falls in love with him. They are discovered by the French but manage to escape. The drama was popular not only inside the country but also with Vietnamese abroad.

Tram Huong expresses a strong feminist bent: Vietnamese women, she says, are superwomen who have suffered more, overcome [End Page 276] more, and are therefore stronger than men. The women carry the greater burden in the society, she says, whether in war or peace. A single mother, she currently works at the Women's Museum and supplements the small salary with her writing. In December 1997, she was writing another television drama, Fiery Dusk (Nang quai), referring to the sun burning hottest just before sunset--like the fiery desire for life that people experience just before death. The play focuses on the personal life and career of a female doctor. But rather than singling out her contributions, the play emphasizes the extraordinary strength of the ordinary women she encounters.


Hanoi Dramatists
Like their counterparts in the south, women playwrights and directors are a strong presence in Hanoi's theatre scene. Although they do not simultaneously fulfill as many roles, they often work with each other in close collaboration. Foremost is Pham Thi Thanh, one of the founding members and former chairwoman of the Youth Theatre (Nha Hat Tuoi Tre), the city's most active and profitable theatre. Although half of its repertoire is for children, the Youth Theatre has been the one constant site of new plays for an adult audience. Founded in 1978, the 650-seat theatre with a proscenium stage has featured Western classics, melodramas, realistic dramas, and pantomimes. The theatre now evinces the presence of a new concept in Vietnamese theatre: corporate sponsorship. Plessez, a vitamin company, advertises on its tickets and posters.

Following the precedent of two other women stage directors who assumed the chairmanship of the Youth Theatre--Ha Nhan and Pham Thuy Chi--Pham Thi Thanh has been instrumental in encouraging new playwrights and staging controversial plays. Unlike many established Vietnamese dramatists, she does not come from a theatre family. In fact, she is a member of the political elite whose forebears served not only as officials in the royal court but as revolutionary ministers as well. She began her performing career at fourteen, singing and dancing as an actress of cheo--the indigenous traditional theatre of northern Vietnam--hiding her activities from her parents who would certainly have disapproved. During the American War, she joined a clandestine troupe that roamed the countryside exhorting the people to fight and resist. After acting for fifteen years, she was sent to the Moscow Theatre Institute in 1972 to study directing.

Upon her return, she helped establish the Youth Theatre and then directed the country's first full-length Shakespeare performances: Romeo and Juliet (1982) and Othello (1988). Having directed more than ninety plays, she has staged both Western classics and new or unknown [End Page 277] Vietnamese plays, sometimes going back into the recent past to present excellent scripts that had been overlooked or were too politically controversial at the time of their writing. Such was the popular Vu Nhu To, written in 1942 by the historical writer Nguyen Huy Tuong (1912-1960) but not performed until Thanh's production in 1995. Although it concerns a peasant architect commissioned to build the country's greatest palace for a corrupt king in the sixteenth century, the play challenged current political corruption, military coercion, and the continued plight of Vietnam's rural poor. Both the corrupt king and the peasant architect, however, are motivated by two women characters to pursue their modes of action, whether self-aggrandizing or nobly selfless. Pham Thi Thanh's production combined film, dance, realistic theatre, and a more elaborate set design than Vietnam's realistic theatre usually can afford on the average budget of $500.

Pham Thi Thanh has received many awards for her direction of traditional and modern dramas. In 1997 she was accorded the state's highest honor: People's Artist. Divorced with grown children, Thanh spends a good deal of time traveling abroad, representing Vietnam as chairwoman of the International Association of Theatre for Children and Youth (ASSITEJ). In 1998, she left the Youth Theatre to work at [End Page 278] the Department of Performing Arts where, with the sponsorship of the Ford Foundation, she organized a conference for Asian dramatists to discuss with their Vietnamese counterparts issues of cultural identity in traditional and contemporary Asian theatre.

While directing at the Youth Theatre, Pham Thi Thanh worked in close collaboration with another former cheo actress turned playwright: Nguyen Thi Hong Ngat. Like Thanh, Hong Ngat studied at the Moscow Theatre Institute for six years, concentrating on acting and writing. A famed actress, Hong Ngat is now a well-respected poet and the only woman writer of cheo. Often called "folk opera," cheo is a musical drama with sections of difficult verse. One of her modern cheo dramas was A Match Made by God (Duyen troi, 1996), based on a traditional legend about a princess who marries a poor man and angers the king. Principal in the text, is not only the heroine but the clowns: cheo is known for its social satire, and the fool, called lao (played by a man or woman), is as central to the action as the protagonist; thus the playwright must show versatility in composing verse and comic sequences. In fact, Hong Ngat has said that she will write only spoken dramas in the future because writing cheo texts is too difficult and time-consuming for an ever-diminishing audience. Thanh directed A Match Made by God, but her initial collaboration with Hong Ngat began in 1990 with their adaptation of Erich Segal's Love Story. Since the story fit well within the familiar lines of local melodrama, the result was popular.

Hong Ngat is more interested now in writing contemporary dramas--which recently caused some trouble during her participation at the Ford Foundation and Asian Cultural Council-sponsored Asian Pacific Performance Exchange (APPEX) held at UCLA in 1996. Although invited because she was an eminent artist of a traditional Vietnamese form, she wanted to use the opportunity to explore contemporary issues. The organizers, however, obliged her to contribute her traditional skills--demonstrating the problem of Asian artists who are pigeonholed by American academics. Still, she began writing a play about the love and friendship between a Vietnamese peasant woman and downed American bomber pilot called A Passion for Modern Times (Nguoi cua hom nay). Despite a San Francisco director's interest in the script, it has not yet been performed in either the United States or Vietnam.

Her most famous play, Flying to Paradise (Len tien, 1994) addresses heroin addiction. In the 1990s, stage plays and television dramas about one of Vietnam's most serious social problems have become legion, and most playwrights in the north have addressed the drug problem. (Writers in the south do not seem so moved, although students at the College for Theatre and Cinema in Ho Chi Minh City performed [End Page 279] an antidrug play.) Having known families that were devastated by a member's addiction, Hong Ngat wrote from personal observation and created a more viable script than many who have written formulaic condemnations. Flying to Paradise was first performed by the City Theatre of Haiphong, the port city that has been the focus of much of the government's worry about drugs. The play has been performed more than four hundred times by half a dozen troupes all over the country. Even on such a serious topic, Hong Ngat acknowledges that humor reaches people better than preachiness. Hong Ngat writes one play a year and lives with her fourth husband, a writer and literary critic.

Her contemporary, Hong Viet, following the success of her first staged play, What Do You Come Back To? (Em ve dau?, 1997), was also working on an antidrug play, SOS Green Light (SOS mau xanh) in 1998. What Do You Come Back To? has been a favorite at the Youth Theatre, where Hong Viet's husband is one of the principal actors and serves as vice-director. An actress during the war, she then worked as an assistant director in a military troupe for twenty years. She managed to complete this first full-length play only after retiring from the army and graduating from the College of Theatre and Cinema in Hanoi.

Aside from its run at the Youth Theatre, What Do You Come Back To? has been performed by five different troupes and includes many [End Page 280] themes popular with socially conscious writers: the effects of the new materialist economy, the position of women, rampant corruption, and drug dealing. It begins with a husband carrying in a big boom box and surprising his young son (played by an actress) with the gift. Acting the stereotypical nouveau riche, he lavishes money on an elderly female neighbor and presses sexy new dresses on his bewildered wife, telling her she can give up her job at the local school now that he is making so much money. Soon after revealing that the cash has come from dealing heroin, however, he is caught by the police. Condemned to ten years in prison, he persuades his wife to file divorce papers in order to release her. Although she refuses, she is tempted because waiting in the wings is a doctor who is in love with her. After five years of resisting the doctor's advances, she finally agrees to his proposal. But when she learns that her husband has been released and is leading a simple life in the mountains, she rushes to him. The play ends with the family living a tranquil rural life in complete contrast to its materialist aspirations at the beginning. The plot's simplistic morality not only reflects nostalgia for the simple traditional life that now eludes urban dwellers, it also avoids the reality of the poverty of country life. Northern dramatists look to the countryside as the site of their yearning for a golden past during this time of great cultural and social upheaval; the playwrights in the south, however, tend to locate their nostalgia in the theatre's golden years.

Breaking up the slow and sentimental second half of the play is an utterly irrelevant comic episode. Three inmates of the prison where the husband is doing time audition for an upcoming cultural show. Two men and one woman imitate famous performers and politicians to the delight of the audience that does not question the inconsequence of the interlude. Its star, Van Dung, is a well-known comic who makes no attempt to portray a real inmate: she appears on stage with immaculate manicure, makeup, and coiffeur but throws her body into lunatic convulsions. Van Dung's lively verbal and physical delivery raises another unique aspect of Vietnamese theatre: the predominance of the female comic. Ai Nhu, Minh Ngoc, and Hong Van in the south are outstanding comic actresses; Van Dung and her colleague Tu Oanh, who plays juvenile roles, both male and female, often dominate the stage with their comic shtick. They show they are perfectly capable of preserving their feminine beauty while indulging in grotesque movements and satirical wisecracks.

Pham Thi Thanh, Nguyen Thi Hong Ngat, and Hong Viet, all in their fifties, are making significant changes of direction in their theatre careers in 1998, but none is abandoning theatre. Hong Viet says she wishes there was more money available for writing, since only [End Page 281] twenty playwrights in the whole country are chosen to receive government funding. Hong Ngat says Vietnamese playwrights face problems different from those in other countries since the demand for new plays is high and writers cannot keep up with the demands from theatre companies, but the financial remuneration is insufficient.

Still, the most pessimistic of all the playwrights interviewed was also the youngest and least experienced: the twenty-six-year-old Hoang To Mai. Daughter of a well-known literary critic, she was the youngest recipient of an Asian Cultural Council grant that allowed her to go to New York and observe theatre. Working as a journalist covering the local cultural scene, she is critical of the stagnation she sees in the theatre, charging that it is far behind contemporary developments in literature and painting. She bemoans the utter lack of anything new and makes little attempt to enter into the established theatre of her elders. Instead, she has written a play in English, Blue Shirt with a White Collar, that has little of the comedy or sentimentality audiences expect. A wistful lyrical play, it is about a doctor who serves among the Dzao, one of the ethnic minorities, and, having saved the life of a mother and daughter, receives some blue cloth from them. She gives the cloth to her own daughter and the girl has a shirt made from it by another Dzao woman. The shirt is invested with magical properties that make her so beautiful she catches the attention of a painter who paints her portrait. One night, the blue shirt flies away when the Dzao seamstress rejoins her husband in the mountains. The doctor and her daughter never see the shirt again until twenty years later when they come across the painting in a museum.

Full of disembodied voices, ellipses of time, and the interweaving of the Dzao village and doctor's residence, the entire play exists in a dreamlike memory. Although it has not been performed, it is scheduled to be published in the army journal. To Mai says she will probably direct it herself since most directors will not touch such an uncommercial script. Similarly, literature students can read contemporary foreign plays by Pirandello and Beckett, but no one will stage them. The actors too, she says, are more entertainers than artists, and show little initiative to explore anything new.


The Stage as the Site of Freedom
With such plays being written, adapted, or directed by women, one can see that female characters either dominate the stage or play roles that are as central to the action as those of the men. One rarely sees male characters taking center stage while the women remain on the periphery. That so many women are writing and directing plays certainly contributes to the numerous strong roles for women and the expression of women's views toward family, work, war, and peace. [End Page 282]

The causes are elusive, however. One could suggest that because so many men were killed in wars over the past fifty years, women have had to take their place in many public spheres. In addition, the communist policy of equality between the sexes has allowed greater numbers of women to become involved in political and military affairs, especially in the north. During the American War, plays focused on the soldier, the guerrilla fighter, and the spy. After the war, plays emphasized the plight of women: the widowed, homeless, childless, poor, and ill. In the 1990s, however, female characters sometimes appear as villains representing the worst aspects of modern materialism that distorts and destroys relationships. More often, they continue to depict the traditional female virtue of endurance, demonstrating a personal integrity that withstands all adversity without abdicating to traditional patriarchal values (but without necessarily challenging them either).

The traditional Vietnamese stage has always included actresses and featured strong women's roles. Tuong--or hat boi as it is known in the south, the stylized musical theatre derived from the Chinese in the thirteenth century--did not follow the later Chinese custom of removing actresses from the stage or segregating them. Many plays feature women warriors and exemplary female nationalists. Cheo, too, is very female oriented: not only are there strong central women characters, but its plots usually take the marginalized and satirical female view of the status quo.

Current television dramas present a much narrower view of women's life and experience--emphasizing their suffering--with characterizations of sympathetic but ineffectual mothers and ruined daughters, both spending 50 percent of their on-air time weeping. The stage offers a much greater variety of character types and situations, more subtle ranges of emotion, and more levels of sensitivity and intellectual understanding. Moreover, actresses often star in the comic roles and share the limelight equally with male comedians.

What all these women dramatists share is a strong love of country. In the south, however, country means something different from government and the Communist Party, while in the north the writers are more closely aligned with the government's and the party's policies and more accepting of the three forming an inseparable unit. The year 1975 is embedded in the subconsciousness of the south. And while some plays address what occurred with poetic directness, others employ circumlocution, by setting the action during the war against the French--when the country was united against a foreign enemy rather than turned against itself. Not always sharing the same political convictions as their colleagues in the north, the southern playwrights concentrate more on the creative telling of the story, presenting their perspectives through more personalized and individualized stories. [End Page 283] The northerners, by contrast, stress the ideological message and present more generic situations.

Rather than finding a raison d'etre in present-day theories of feminism, many of these writers have elected to write about the merging of their personal dilemmas with the theatre stage, a world in which they feel comfortable. Statistics show that Vietnamese women occupy more positions in parliament than in most countries and, moreover, possess a legal and political status that allow them many more opportunities than previously. What remains problematic are personal relations between men and women. Given that many of the dramas are plays-within-a-play, or that the characters are frequently writers or actors, one might argue that the stage itself is the site of freedom, equality, and self-expression for these women--a place where they can act out fears and fantasies that cannot be resolved by revolution or legislation.


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