Historical Context for Inside Out & Back Again

I recently finished all 10 episodes of The Vietnam War, a new Ken Burns documentary on PBS. My primary reason for watching was to understand more about the conflict which is an integral part of the setting of Inside Out & Back Again. The documentary is quite an achievement, and there is much that I could write about it. But I'll focus instead on how the documentary contributes to my work as a playwright. During a recent dramaturgical meeting about Inside Out & Back Again, I realized I had more informed thoughts about what could be happening for the characters after having watched Ken Burns' work. Here are just a few of those insights:

War was "normal" life: After our first table read of the play, a question was put forth as to whether we could show more of Hà's "normal" life before the Fall of Saigon. That it felt like we were too quickly into the war without a sense of peace. However, historically speaking, ten year-old Hà has never known a Saigon without war. And with attacks like the Tet Offensive in 1968, Hà has already seen terrible events, or at least been nearby. For Hà, war has always been present. Even if Saigon has seen days of peace, the threat from the north is always imminent.

The Fall of Saigon was imminent: The eventual Fall of Saigon is laid out very clearly in Thanhha Lai's book, but it didn't dawn on me just how frightening that specter might have seemed to a mother of four living in the city. In early 1975, the North Vietnamese were making their way south, taking city after city, and it would only be a matter of time before Saigon would succumb as well. Understanding this helps me begin to grasp the desperation of the predicament Hà's mother finds herself in, figuring out whether she should flee or stay.

The white American perspective dominates our narrative of the war: One criticism I have of the documentary is that it definitely gives more airtime to the experience of white families affected by the war. While there are interviews with Vietnamese from the North and South side of the conflict, the more emotional through-lines of the series center on white Americans. This gets me excited about working on the stage version of Inside Out & Back Again. This play will be a chance to turn the focus onto a Vietnamese family and their experience and journey. Hà's family ends up in the U.S.A., so it is still very much an American story. We'll be inviting our audiences not to view the Vietnamese as an "other," but as the main characters of a story that all can relate to or at least empathize with.

These might all sound like things that I should have known already, and I kinda did. But it is one thing to know the facts of the war, and quite another to be brought into the emotional experience of it, and I think Ken Burns' documentary helped do that for me. It is worth noting that the documentary focuses heavily on the American perspective, and most of the personal stories in it are focused on a predominantly white narrative. The breadth of Vietnamese perspectives (of which Thanhha Lai's book is one) is barely covered, so I will be doing some reading of Vietnamese accounts as well. But I still highly recommend watching it, if only to learn a bit of the overview of events, and especially if you don't know much about the Vietnam War to begin with.

Creativity Quotation #22

"A perfect theatrical song is not the same as a perfect pop song, nor is it the same as a perfect operatic aria. The kind of storytelling that happens in a musical is specific to the form, where the journeys of the characters on stage determine the pace and tone of the storytelling. The composer of a musical, therefore, has to constantly negotiate between the sheer musical pleasures that the audience (and the composer!) desires and the basic storytelling that the audience is following." - Jason Robert Brown, Composer & Lyricist

Revising the Nightingale: An Ode to Long and Feng

The biggest script change from the previous version of The Song of the Nightingale and the upcoming Town Hall Theatre production is the removal of two clown-like twins named Long and Feng. This duo served as the Emperor's main attendants and provided a lot of the comic relief in the show. They did cartwheels, offered sarcastic commentary, and oh -- the puns! When it came time to revise the show, however, I knew that I needed to cut down the duration considerably. Long and Feng rarely did anything to push the plot forward, and anything that did feel substantial to the story could easily be handed to another character. I decided to try this new version without them. By doing so, I also discovered that removing the characters of Long and Feng allowed the humor and presence of the other characters to shine through more clearly, without any vaudevillian interruptions. What's remarkable is that the idea of cutting the twins from the show would never have dawned on me sans the prospect of a second production on the horizon. As I said in a previous post, I don't know that a show is ever "done," but I'm so grateful to Town Hall Theatre for this chance to explore and experiment with a more streamlined Nightingale.

And thank you, Long and Feng, for your time and service to the show.

Feng (Isabel To) and Long (Christopher Juan) - you will be missed. But don't worry! Isabel and Chris are now playing other roles in the new production!

When is a musical "done?"

A question many artists face is "At what point do you know you are done with your work?" When do you put the paintbrush down, hit that print button, finalize the master? For those of us in the performing arts, the occasion of an opening night helps provide a cut-off date. In most cases, it's inappropriate to make considerable changes to a show once it's opened, so that first performance of a run is as good a marker as any to indicate doneness. And sometimes, we need that marker to tell us it's time to stop and let the work live on its own as is. That doesn't guarantee, however, that we will have a strong internal sense that the work is complete.

In fact, I often feel that a show of mine is never done. Or at least, there is always room for my work to be tweaked, re-thought, analyzed (case in point, the newly revised version of The Song of the Nightingale opening at Town Hall Theatre this month). I like to think of it as a question of whether the work is "done enough." This can be just as vague and difficult to pin down, but at least it doesn't imply an ominous finality to the work.

Learning when my work is "done enough" has been a matter of practice and experience. This is the value of readings and workshops. Each time I bring a play or musical to a group of actors to read or sing, I aim for it to be "done enough" for that particular occasion. I try to approach productions the same way. What needs to be "done enough" for opening night? There will always be threads of story or thought that would be interesting to explore. There will always be other decisions that characters can make. There will always be the relative aspects of art that can be debated for years. But, is the musical "done enough" to present in a reading, a workshop, opening night? I have found thinking of the work in this way far more helpful and far less harrowing, because it holds out hope that once closing night hits, I am welcome to re-open that script file on my laptop and begin cracking away at it again.

The Story of Furusato

A friend recently asked me where the idea for "Furusato" came from. This Four Immigrants song appears in the so-called "11 o'clock Number" slot - late in Act II, just before the show ends. My friend wondered if the concept of furusato was addressed in Kiyama's book (it is not), and whether it was based on an existing folk melody (it is not or at least only incidentally). The story of this song is actually something magical, and one that makes me wonder if the Muses are indeed a real thing.

One day, while getting frustrated with a section in Act I, I decided to fiddle around with some pentatonic melodies and tonalities. I knew I wanted a song or two that would reflect Japanese culture at some point in the show. In my exploration, I stumbled upon a four-note phrase with an underlying harmony that struck me emotionally. My eyes started tearing up as I played this phrase over and over again. "Why am I crying?" I thought to myself. I jotted down the notes, then headed out to grab lunch. As I was walking, though, I remember thinking "I don't know why or how, but this song is in the show..."

I wondered what the song could be about. As more and more of the script was completed, and as I got to the harrowing Turlock scene during which Frank is forced out of town, it was clear to me that this mystery song must arise from that pain. The idea of "home" seemed a fitting theme for it. For the immigrants at this point in the play, there is a big question as to whether America has become or will ever truly be home. I looked up the Japanese word for home, and among the many options, I found furusato. A word with four syllables that perfectly fit the four-note phrase I had discovered. What is particularly poignant about the word is that while you can use the words "home" or "hometown," there is a unique, nostalgic quality to the word in Japanese. There is also a bit of a rural connotation that seems to fit the story of these four men who travel to the urban center of San Francisco.

In my research, I did discover an existing Japanese children's song called Furusato. Interestingly, it seems to be based in Western harmonies (take a listen), and I made an artistic choice that I wanted the folk song in my show to harken back to a time before Western harmony had entered Japanese music. It makes for a complicated discussion about where "authenticity" comes from when writing culturally-specific work -- a discussion that deserves its own full article.

Fascinatingly, though, when Akiko Kiyama - Henry Kiyama's granddaughter - came to see the show, she said that my "Furusato" reminded her of a song she knew. And of course, it was the children's song.

"Furusato" is reprised at the end of the show with a wish for the entire audience: "May you find furusato." At a party at translator of The Four Immigrants Manga Frederik L. Schodt's house, Akiko commented that it was apt to end the show that way, because her childhood "furusato" was one that you might sing with others at the end of a gathering, as a sort of benediction. She and her husband Ken'ichi graciously sang the song for us as our gathering drew to a close. A magical coda and further confirmation that indeed, "Furusato" was meant for The Four Immigrants.

A photo with Akiko (to my left) and her husband Ken'ichi (to my right) at translator Frederik L. Schodt's house (far left).