A DREAM IN HANOl (U.S./Vietnam):
Dreaming in Vietnam
BOB HICKS
Bill and Hillary Clinton didn't show up.
A half-dozen unexpected fairies did.
A stage kiss threw aVietnamese actress for a loop.
An American producer wept tears of frustration.
A Vietnamese director insisted on hacking away line after line of Shakespeare's words.
And somehow, through months of squabbling, misunderstanding and hard-earned trust, an unlikely team of Vietnamese and American theater artists created a production of A Midsummer Nights Dream that captivated audiences from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City.
A Dream in Hanoi: A True Story of Love, Stage Fright and Noodle Soup is a rare and fascinating inside look at the making of a small bicultural miraclea collaboration in 2000 between the renowned Central Dramatic Company of Vietnam and Portlands Artists Repertory Theatre on a production of Shakespeares great comic fantasy.
Writer/director Tom Weidlingers documentary, which is narrated by F. Murray Abraham, is a swift, sometimes funny and always compelling record of an experience that became richly rewarding but seemed at times like a horrifying comedy of crossed signals and conflicting ambitions.
A Dream in Hanoi plays Thursday, Friday (July 18, 19) and July 21 at the Northwest Film Center.
It captures the challenges and frustrations and triumphs of the process, says A.R.T.s artistic director, Allen Nause, who co-directed Shakespeares play with Vietnams Doan Hoang Giang. When I watch it, it feels like I'm living it all over again.
Part of the films drama comes from the messy battle of wills that goes along with the making of any collaborative creative art. Much comes from the continuing misunderstandings between two cultures whose main point of mutual reference is still the years when they were at war. And some comes from the unspoken but inevitable question lurking backstage: If its this hard for people from two cultures to agree on something they all want to do, how hard must it be for two countries to negotiate on the really tough matters?
I just had to accept the fact that there are some enormous cultural differences, Nause says. Good diplomats understand that there is often a wide gap between what they think they know and what they actually know. The thing that kept surprising me is that very often we thought we were on the same page, Nause recalls. One day Id think, Well, I handled that pretty well. And then the next day Id discover I was 180 degrees off.
On both sides, surprise was an everyday companion. Lorelle Browning, a passionate Shakespearean at Pacific University in Forest Grove who spent years organizing the project through her group Vietnam America Theater Exchange, was devotedto the play's words. Giang, a strong-willed, nearly legendary figure in Vietnamese theater, was determined to create a visual spectacle built on the bones of Shakespeare's plot.
Nause often found himself somewhere in the middleand, often enough, unaware of something really big until the last minute. With just two weeks of rehearsal left, Giang announced that he wanted the mischief-maker Puck to have a cadre of six fairies at his beck and calla major design and staging complication. Browning exploded. Giang dug in his heels. Nause negotiated. It wasn't the idea of the thing so much, Nause recalls, as how we learned about it. Ultimately I think his ideas worked pretty well.
Other snags, such as the flustering stage kiss, arose from differing cultural customs. Vietnamese are much more conservative than Americans about shows of public affection; on stage the custom is for actors to mime a kiss, not actually do one.
Work habits were a big issue, with the Americans eager to get things done efficiently and the Vietnamese suspicious of the tightly prearranged time schedule. One of the biggest things for me is, where are our values?" Nause says. For Americans it often seems to be work: What can we knock off our list today? In Vietnam it's just very different. Family comes first. At first I think the Vietnamese were just baffled by the American way of working. But I think we grew to an understanding of each other's way of working.
Then there was the Great Clinton Letdown. Political relations between the two countries had just been normalized, and the president and first lady were touring Vietnam. Word came that they might attend A Midsummer Night's Dream. The Vietnamese seemed excited. A Clinton emissary came to see the company and was enthusiastic. Television crews from CNN, ABC and elsewhere began to show up.
Then, right before opening, the bottom fell out. The Clintons wouldn't be there, after alland Midsummer was going to have to move out of Hanoi's ornate Opera House, the city's most prestigious performance hall, to make way for a more traditional Vietnamese show that the Clintons would attend. It was a psychological blow, Nause remembers, to go off with our tails between our legs and have to find another theater space.
But find one they did -- and the show went on. One of the sweetest moments in A Dream in Hanoi comes when Weidlingers camera pans over the audience and reveals a sea of shining faces, rapt, caught up in pleasure over a story they'd never seen before.
I loved the production, Nause says. All of my ideas were there, and all of Lorelles ideas were there, and all of Mr. Giangs ideas were there. That's what you hope for in a collaboration."
The documentary ends on another sweet note, perhaps the most telling of the entire tale. As the show's run concludes, the Vietnamese and American partners embrace and shed genuine tears at parting, difficulties forgotten in the warmth of understanding and affection. It is an endingand a beginning. Next season, a Vietnamese set designer and a marketing expert from the Midsummer team will come to Portland to work on projects at A.R.T. And in November, Nause, Browning and stage manager Stephanie Mulligan will return to Vietnam on a Ford Foundation-sponsored retreat to help figure out what their next joint project will be.
Ive created such good friends, Nause says, that Ill be going back for years.
You can reach Bob Hicks at 503-221-8369 or by e-mail at bobhicks@news.oregonian.com.
