From Letters from Home: A Multimedia Solo Play
- From Letters from HomeA Multimedia Solo Play
Editors' Note
In 2016, writer/performer Kalean Ung learned of a drawer in her father's study. It was filled with letters from family and friends living in desperate circumstances in refugee camps, and detailing their lives during the Khmer Rouge regime. A multimedia solo play, Letters from Home weaves together the stories her father told her of arriving in America in the 1960s as a young music student, her Cambodian family's refugee story, her own story as a biracial, first-generation American, and her experience playing Shakespeare's iconic female characters. These stories are embodied and interwoven with projections, her father Chinary Ung's original compositions, and artifacts that enshrine the people and places of this collective history. The following is excerpted from chapters 2, 5, and 6.
setting
An office filled with objects, artifacts, family pictures, various altars with vibrant colors and textures, a desk and a stool, a red console, a Balinese room divider, stacks of books, music scores, a colorful trunk, a music stand, plants, and other things. Practical lights are hidden throughout the space—behind books, behind furniture, and on the desk. She has collected facsimiles of artifacts, essential props, and drawing material that she has prepared for her storytelling. This is not to say that she knows how the story will unfold, but these are the tools she has decided she needs to tell her story to her confidantes who are listening and watching. She uses a document camera to write, draw, and show us these artifacts as she encounters them. The play takes place in this room only, but we are often transported across time and space. Surfaces will become projection areas. It is important that the space is the space—meaning that a notepad, or a picture frame, or the wallpaper becomes animated as if it were coming to life. Magic is conjured through the embodiment of her storytelling. Sometimes the storyteller conjures a magical transformation, and sometimes the space, as a character, manifests as a presence. The lines of this disintegrate over the time and space of the play. The play is divided into thirteen chapters, and at each intersection we should not pause; rather we should feel like we are stepping into a deeper portal of the storytelling or are peeling a new layer back. [End Page 322]
Kalean sits back at her desk. Under a document camera, she awkwardly writes her name in Khmer on a beautiful piece of paper. She transforms into eight-year-old Kalean as her family sits at the kitchen table eating dinner.
Dad, how come you never taught us Khmer?
She becomes Dad, as he grunt-shrugs the issue. Her eight-year-old self turns to Mother incredulously. Then she becomes her mother.
Well, Kalean, your father was really upset about what happened, and he didn't really want you to be Cambodian kids. It was just too Goddamn painful.
Well, it is painful for us too! [She transforms back into present-day Kalean and speaks to her confidantes.] My sister, Sonika, and I are angry with our father because when we play with our cousins and stay with our family, we feel like we don't quite belong.
But where do we belong? As an adult, every time I meet somebody new and introduce myself, they say, "Wow, 'Kalean'? It's such a beautiful name, where is it from? Oh, Cambodia? That's so unique, that's so exotic! I've never heard of that before!"
Of course I know that all of this is out of curiosity and even admiration, but can I tell you that when you say things like that, I feel like some bizarre dog breed that you just discovered.
She finds her Khmer book among a stack. She puts it next to her name in Khmer, which is underneath the doc camera.
Six months before my wedding, I decide I want to learn Khmer. [She is surprised as she reflects back on this.] Luckily, I'm in LA, and Long Beach is home to the largest Cambodian population in the U.S. and...
