Operation Babylift

One of the many influences on the play Hungry Ghosts was Operation Babylift, which was the mass evacuation of children from Vietnam during the war. In April 1975, over 3,000 Vietnamese children, most of them under the age of eight, were airlifted from Saigon and sent to adoptive families in the United States and other countries. This was an attempt to rescue children from the approaching North Vietnamese army, amid terrible rumors about what the North Vietnamese would do to the children, especially children fathered by American G.I.s. We’ve all seen films, both real and fictional, of the fall of Saigon, and we know it was a time of desperation. The planes were crowded. The smallest babies traveled in cardboard boxes. Frequently, a lack of complete documentation contributed to the confusion, and some children arrived in the US without any information about their identity or even their age, just an ID number assigned during the trip.

Families in America and other countries waited to adopt these children and give them new homes. News footage shows the orphans and their temporary guardians in giant, echoing rooms (gymnasiums? auditoriums?) waiting to be claimed by the adoptive parents. The scene is noisy, crowded and confusing. I can only imagine how terrifying it was to be a small child, snatched from your home, speaking no English, handed over to complete strangers. It’s like a scene in a techno fairy tale.

The operation was controversial, as international and cross-cultural adoptions still are. Some people called it a great humanitarian mission, while others accused the US government of childnapping. Many critics accused President Gerald Ford of a last-ditch effort to gain sympathy for a failed war.

Many of the children were genuine orphans whose children had been killed in the war. However, many others were not orphans, but children whose mothers wanted to give them a better life in the United States. In some cases, the women didn’t fully understand that the children would be adopted by other families. I have watched documentary footage of an American aid worker, a wholesome young blonde, cheerfully trying to persuaded Vietnamese mothers to give her their babies. “You give me your baby,” she says loudly. “I take him to America. He be American boy, okay?” The women laugh at first, assuming it’s a joke, but as they realize she’s serious, fear creeps over their faces. It’s appalling to watch this nice young American girl trying to steal babies. It’s even worse to know that so many women did give away their babies, trying to protect them. I can’t imagine a more heart-breaking decision.

If you’re interested in learning more, I recommend a couple of excellent documentaries, Precious Cargo and The Daughter from Danang.

Ghosts in action

On Sunday, I attended the first rehearsal I've been able since the initial read-through. It amazes me how quickly this cast has bonded. It creates the perfect atmosphere of comfort and trust, which allows them to experiment. Ensemble work is particularly important to this play, so that ability to play and experiment is crucial. Laura, the director, has done a terrific job fostering that.

Working on this script feels almost like writing a symphony. The rhythm and pace are at least as important as the story. That's always true in theatre--musicality always marks a good play--but it's even more true in this play. It sets up a tricky task for the actors. They really need to work together and be right on top of their lines. And that means that I have less time to fiddle around with the script than I might like...especially since I was out of town for a week at the very beginning of the rehearsal process. So today's blog entry will be shorter, so that I can spend a little time tinkering with my script. However, I will share some photos of our very attractive cast, taken during Sunday's rehearsal. The quality is quite grainy, because the theatre was dark and I was trying not use the flash. But the slightly smudgy, almost evasive quality of images seems appropriate for a tale of ghosts.

May Lee Lockhart, who plays Alice, in a pensive moment

Noelle Hardy, who plays Ghost#1, tells a story as the Fortune Teller

Callie Munson, as Ghost #4, listens intently

Tovah Hicks (Ghost #2) and May Lee

TRAILER: Hungry Ghosts

Here's your chance to catch a sneak peek of HUNGRY GHOSTS by M.E.H. Lewis, one of our five new plays featured in LeapFest 6.

Unfortunately, I still haven't figured out (nor have YouTube and Blogger, it seems, between themselves) how to get a 16:9 video to fit on a blog page. Hmmm... so feel free to click here to get to the full video on YouTube. Be sure to click the "HQ" button to see the higher-quality video. Enjoy!

Death in the Street & Chicken-Eating Ghosts

The Hungry Ghost is a Buddhist concept that is common to the beliefs and cultures of many Asian countries, including Vietnam. The Hungry Ghost is the spirit of someone who died in unsatisfied or insatiable need. This could be someone who died of starvation or thirst, but it could also be the spirit of someone who suffered impossible hunger, like addiction or unrequited love. In death, they wander restlessly, endlessly seeking the sustenance they couldn’t get in life. In Asian art, the Hungry Ghost is often depicted as a creature with a huge empty belly and tiny constricted throat, so that each swallow causes great pain.

In traditional Vietnamese culture, ancestor worship is an extremely important part of the belief system. You continue to respect and serve your parents, grandparents and other long after they die, and in return, they bring you prosperity and blessings. Every home has a lovingly maintained ancestor altar, where they make daily offerings to the ancestors.

In addition, most homes have a “street side” altar, a smaller altar or spirit house in the garden or by the front door, where they can make offerings to spirits who are not part of the family, including wandering or hungry ghosts. Unhappy spirits, or those who don’t receive proper respect, can cause terrible bad luck. One of the worst things that can happen is “death in the street,” which means death away from home and family, especially violent death.

It is even worse if a person doesn’t receive proper burial. People who die away from homes, people who die violent deaths and do not receive proper burials and ancestor worship become restless, unhappy, often vengeful ghosts who can wreak havoc on an entire community. Vietnam was at war for hundreds of years. From the American War alone, there are about 30,000 US servicemen still missing, and more than 300,000 Vietnamese servicemen. That doesn’t include the thousands of civilians who died. That’s a lot of angry ghosts wandering the countryside.

There are many stories about hauntings and possessions. One of my favorites is about a house haunted by the ghost of an American soldier, a boy from Tennessee. The family’s grandmother, a 75-year-old woman who had never left Vietnam and spoke no English, suddenly started acting strangely. The family brought in a medium, who told them that the grandmother was possessed by this ghost. In perfect, Southern-inflected English, the grandmother demanded fried chicken and biscuits. When they provided this meal, the Tennessee ghost, speaking through the grandmother, said thank you and left the house. The family was never bothered again.

In this country that has been so torn apart by war, they have found a way to appease the many ghosts who haunt them. They make offerings to all the strange spirits, the American and Vietnamese soldiers who died in battle, and to the civilian victims of bombs and massacres and the horrors of war. The countryside is filled with small shrines, some as simple as a soda bottle holding a few sticks of incense. People even stop in the street to burn a votive or offering. These ghosts and their stories become part of a family, part of a community. After so much pain and loss, the culture heals itself by accepting and healing the spirits of everyone who suffered, even those who caused the greatest pain.

A woman in the street, burning votive offerings to restless spirits

LeapFest production blog--initial thoughts

This year my play Hungry Ghosts will receive a workshop production, directed by Laura Blegen, as part of LeapFest. This is my third time to participate in the festival, and I’m going to write about the experience in this blog. Here are my first thoughts as I get ready for the first rehearsal I’ve been able to attend.

On April 11th, there was a staged reading of Hungry Ghosts at Chicago Dramatists, directed by the lovely Hallie Gordon. This was a wonderful experience, and very informative for me. I’m learning more and more about this play as I work on it, and I love that process, the process of discovering a play through the voices of the characters, the interpretations of the actors, the smart insights of directors and audience members. This play, even more than my others, has truly been a process of exploration and discovering, uncovering the hidden shapes within it.

This play was initially inspired by the essay “Across the River Styx,” which was published in The New Yorker in 2005. The essay profiled a mission to recover the remains of American Gils who died in Vietnam. The US military spends millions of dollars recovering the remains of lost American servicemen from wars going back to World War I, and in locations as remote and inaccessible as the Himalayas. In one case, the team actually emptied an entire lake seeking the relics of a plane that crashed during the Vietnam War. They then had to refill the lake and minimize their impact upon the landscape. They recovered a single finger bone and a class ring. I was fascinated by the noble, extravagant immensity of this mission.

My early attempts to write this play focused primarily on the archaeological and military aspects of the mission. The initial working title was Last Known Alive, a term which refers to the last information about a serviceman who is missing in action, the last time and place he was seen alive. And the military aspects of the mission are fascinating, including translators, mortuary specialists who care for the remains, unexploded ordinance technicians who defuse the grenades, landmines and other explosives found during an excavation. (During one excavation, they encountered an average of five landmines a day.) Amazing, absorbing stuff, rich in dramatic possibility. And yet, and yet… somehow it wasn’t quite right. A ghost crept into the mix, the ghost of an American soldier. I knew that might be a bit clichéd, but I didn’t care because I’m a sucker for ghost stories. I liked this character. But I was still a bit stymied by the play. So I set it aside. I was absorbed in a production of Creole at InFusion Theatre.

And life in general got in the way, as it has a tendency to do. I had a few too many brushes with mortality, my own and those of loved ones, a rough time that I won’t discuss here.

Then last summer, I enjoyed a residency at Ragdale, an artists’ retreat in Lake Forest. While I was there, I worked on Hungry Ghosts, which I also workshopped with Infusion Theatre and the DCA Incubator Series. Long days of research and intense writing, with long walks on the prairie, interspersed with hectic workshop days. According to lore, Ragdale House is haunted, so maybe I had a visitation. Whatever the reason, the original ghost of the play was soon joined by more, many more. The original military aspect of the play retreated, and the story was overrun by ghosts.

I’ve figured out that the play is about ghosts and stories---ghost stories told by ghosts—and somehow, in a way I can’t quite explain, ghosts and stories are the same. They are where we come from, what we are made of, our substance and our soul. Joseph Campbell says that the world is made of stories, that stories are how we carry our cultural DNA, and this play is about the stories that comprise a tiny village in a country that has more ghosts than most.