As people filed into the Wish Theater to watch Oceana Hangret’s capstone theater project, they were each handed a sleeping mask. After they had settled into their seats and adjusted their masks, the theater was darkened, preparing them for a live audio performance.
For two nights, on April 11 and 12, a cast of ten students and one professor—Hangret’s advisor, Professor of Theater Davis Robinson—performed a play Hangret had written based on a Vietnamese folktale her mother used to tell her and her sister.
“According to her, if my sisters and I ate in the dark, we would attract demons that steal children,” said Hangret. “In her own weird way, she was trying to prevent us from making a mess, but as a child, the logic behind that story made sense.”
In Hangret’s version of the myth, however, the multiple demons become one woman, which is the name of the play: “The Woman.” And then she gave the woman a back story.
The woman was not born a demon. She came from nobility but fell in love with a farmer, with whom she had a secret daughter. Prevented from marrying him, she is instead married off to an emperor. They fail to conceive a prince—a necessity for continuing the royal bloodline—and the emperor fears he will be replaced by his brother. When the emperor learns about her child, he plans to murder it to protect the secret of his own infertility.
And then, in a fit of rage, he stabs his wife's eye, blinding her. As she dies, she curses him, swearing to steal every child in the empire. Yet she can only snatch children when she can smell the food they’re snacking on in the dark.
The play swings between past and present. In today’s time, it follows an eleven-year-old girl named Kelley Margot who gets separated from her peers on a camping trip. When she seeks refuge from the rain in a cave, she finds an anxious boy named Tal Tal. They break down and eat a snack together in the dark.
The next morningl, Kelley Margot wakes up in the cave and finds that Tal Tal has vanished. Later that night, after she's been rescued, Kelley Margot watches the news and learns of skeletal remains found in the cave—the remains of Tal Tal, who went missing two years ago after his father put him to bed. Unbeknownst to his father, Tal Tal had a snack of shrimp crackers in bed.
Hangret said she was inspired to write the script after studying at the Eugene O’Neill National Theater Institute in Connecticut last semester. As a student there, she was assigned to write narrative based on a story, tradition, or culture she grew up with. For this, she turned to the “countless narratives of Vietnam in the context of war” that she had read, watched, and heard over her lifetime.
“As a Vietnamese American, I yearned to better understand my country, but a part of me could never separate the identity of war from Vietnam,” she said. “So, with the help of my friends and the theater department, I turned the innocent superstition my mother told me at an impressionable age into a play that explores grief and solitude through a different lens.”
She added, “I grew up hearing those narratives and wanted to change them. I wanted to separate Western perspectives of Vietnam and war to a perception of Vietnam that wasn't tied to violence.”
Hangret wrote and directed the play, as well as created the soundscape. She also proposed staging it during admitted students week, to showcase “representation and diversity in ϳԹվ's theater department,” she said.
Robinson praised this decision. “What I love about working with Oceana is that she is so confident and capable, and makes decisions early on,” such as planning dates for the show. “She solves problems very confidently and knows what she wants.”
Robinson also said he was so inspired by the concept of putting on a play in the dark that he's going to do something similar next fall at the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival.
Hangret said performing her play in the dark pushed the audience to rely on their sense of hearing and their imaginations, and though they couldn't see one another, they were pulled into a close experience. “In this digital age, we as people have become more disconnected than ever,” she said.
“When our sight is taken, our hearing and touch are enhanced,” she continued. “Not a lot of people listen and talk to each other and hear how interesting our stories are.”
