We the same's dramatic tale of Vietnamese refugees is, at its core, a mother-daughter story
Playwright Sangeeta Wylie and Ruby Slippers director Diane Brown interweave traditional music, shadow puppetry, animation, and camera closeups for livestream premiere
We the same integrates shadow puppetry, seen here during the production’s residency at The Cultch.
Actors Grace Le and Elizabeth Thai. Photo by Emily Cooper;
The Cultch livestreams Ruby Slippers Theatre’s we the same from November 3 to 7
OFTEN, THE MOST incredible stories are shared over food—in this case, hand-wrapped Vietnamese salad rolls with a delicious homemade peanut sauce.
Sangeeta Wylie was at a neighbour’s barbecue with five other friends when she struck up a conversation with her host about the origins of the dish—and how the woman’s family had come to Canada from Vietnam.
Her neighbour, who arrived in this country at five years old, started to relate the fragments she knew of her family’s story as part of the wave of “boat people”—the refugees who fled by water in the wake of the Vietnam War, sparking a migration and humanitarian crisis.
“As she started to tell us the story, our jaws were dropping,” Wylie says. “She said there were pirate attacks, typhoons—but she didn’t know the details.”
Four years later, Wylie has not only tracked down those first-person details, she’s also travelled to Southeast Asia to retrace the refugee family’s route and written a multidisciplinary play inspired by their experiences. Presented by Ruby Slippers Theatre, we the same has grown into a performance that interweaves Asian cultural forms—think traditional Vietnamese music, ritual dance, and shadow puppets—with Western theatre conventions, all livestreaming in a complex shoot with seven cameras.
But Wylie, a dentist and actor who loves to write and yearned to pen a play—more on that later—says that the heart of the story traces back to meeting her neighbour’s Vietnamese mother. She spent three days interviewing her, uncovering the details that the matriarch hadn’t yet passed on to her daughter. “What I witnessed doing that became the spine of the story,” Wylie emphasizes. “I saw my friend grow closer as they talked, because all of a sudden her daughter was hearing the story with details for the first time in her life. So it was incredible to see that.”
We the same is, at its heart, a mother-daughter immigrant story—one that hit home with Wylie, as a second-generation Canadian whose mother had come from here from India. She understood the disconnect that sometimes happens between two generations trying to understand each other’s experiences; the reticence of some immigrant parents to share trauma with their children; and the way adult children come to see their parents in new ways.
“I’ve also come to think of that on a broader scale: how important these mother-daughter relationships are, how fragile they can be,” explains Wylie, who was born in Newfoundland, “and I wonder how much healthier our society would be if our relationships were intact.”
Wylie first developed the play through Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre and Playwright Theatre Centre’s MSG Lab, later successfully submitting it to Ruby Slippers Theatre’s Advance Theatre Festival that showcases new work by BIPOC artists. More recently, the creation team had a residency at The Cultch.
Ruby Slippers’ Diane Brown directs the multifaceted world premiere with assistant director Patricia Trinh, along with input from cultural consultants Stella Nhung Davis and Tammy Le-Son.
Their sensitive approach is a nod to the fact that this is a story borrowed from the Truong family and their culture.
Sangeeta Wylie
Brown says it’s been important to be as authentic and respectful as possible, especially as the creative team integrates traditional art forms. Vi An Diep provides live musical composition in the show, while choreographer Shanny Ran draws on ancient traditional dance. Brown says the team wanted to integrate famed Vietnamese water puppets, but the elaborate art form became too complex to pull off; (in Hanoi, a theatre that has a stage filled with water is a huge tourist draw.) Instead, the team has digitized and animated shadow puppetry to help illustrate some of the more climactic moments of a storm at sea, a shipwreck, and pirate attacks.
“So there’s a lot going on in terms of these storytelling techniques,” Brown says, sharing the call with Wylie, “the idea being to tell a story that is authentic, but a blending of Canadian storytelling techniques as well. So it’s an interesting and exciting hybrid—it’s a challenge, but a wonderful challenge.” The longtime stage director adds that she’s found new potential in livestreaming: it may lack the immediacy of live theatre, she says, but it allows for an extraordinary intimacy through its camera closeups.
On the day Stir patches the pair into a conference call, Wylie is in the far reaches of northern BC, volunteering her time to help at COVID vaccination clinics. She says that dentistry training helped develop her passion for caring for people (not to mention her intense focus on detail). Her work in health care also fuels writing she hopes will help connect people in a better world.
“Writing and acting have brought me full circle, to what I want to do with my dentistry,” she adds. “My vaccine work is just a stepping stone to asking, How do we do we change systems? How are we doing our oral health care in the North with our First Nations communities? Even with the vaccination clinics, I’m trying to do more than giving them a jab in the arm. I’m trying to take care of them—it’s really about taking care of the person first.”
For Brown’s part, she sees we the same as working toward a larger purpose, too—one that shows how theatre can bring people together, at a time when the globe is fractured.
“It’s become very clear to me working on this project that, because we live in a world with ‘alternative facts’, this is something that actually brings us back to a normal compass for what is real and not real,” Brown asserts. “It’s relevant for what's happening in Afghanistan—it’s relevant for anyone who's ever felt othered.
“How do we take care of people who have been traumatized?” she adds. “How do we inspire people who need to tell their stories?”
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