Courtesy of Miranda Maung

Oceana Hangret ’25 wrote and directed “The Woman,” a play that explores women’s roles through grief and solitude between the past and the present. The play was supported by the Ray Rutan Fund and performed on April 10 and April 11 at the Wish Theater.

Hangret was inspired by demon stories that her mother would tell her as a child. Her play was about a superstition that forbids children from eating in the dark as The Woman (Eleanor Beyreis ’25) can appear and take them away.

The story begins when 11-year-old Kelley Margot (Lindsay Golan ’27) takes refuge in a cave from the storm. In the cave, Kelley meets another anxious child, Tal Tal (Reynaldo Fuentez ’26), who teaches her about The Woman. The play then travels back in time, to when The Woman is forced to marry an emperor, unfolding how she became a demon.

Hangret wrote the script last semester while at the Eugene O’Neill National Theater Institute. She turned it into a play and directed it this semester. The performance was mostly auditory, requiring the audience to wear eye-masks for most of the play.

In her director’s note, Hangret explained her motivation for creating “The Woman.”

“As a Vietnamese American, I yearned to better understand my country, but a part of me could never separate the identity of war away from Vietnam,” Hangret wrote. “With the help of my friends in 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, one that hasn’t been tainted by war. As a playwright, I hope to create stories that envision what Vietnam means to me and present them to those who will listen.”

Shariqa Tasnim Sultana ’28, an audience member, enjoyed the play and the perspective it brought to Bowdoin theater.

“I appreciated the fact that this was not a white-washed theater. I feel like a lot of theater productions at Bowdoin have no diversity in terms of the storyline. They cast a lot of diverse actors, but usually the storylines are super Eurocentric and deal with really surface level problems,” Sultana said. “I really liked how this [play] was highlighting an Asian substory and Asian creativity, which I have not seen a lot on this campus.”

When writing the play, Hangret had three main pillars in mind: human connection, culture and women.

“[Human connection] is why we took off our masks, so that you only have yourself and other people to rely on, and you’re not distracted with the phones,” Hangret said in an interview with the Orient. “With women, I wanted to just tell a story about how women are always villainized. With culture, obviously, I wanted to bring a little bit of Vietnamese culture into this and talk about this story that was passed down. So it was a creative process that could not have been done without the support of so many people.”

Beyreis commented on her character’s complex personality.

“I think [The Woman’s] very tenacious. She is also carrying the pain of all women; she’s been rejected and made to carry all these burdens. Her happiness has been taken away from her, and she’s just out from home. I think as an actor, you have to have empathy for your character in that situation and be able to fight that fight with them,” Beyreis said.

Audience member Ariana Zou ’28 found the story and its auditory heaviness powerful.

“[The Woman’s] not the villain of the story,” Zou said. “She’s made into it. She’s crafted into being a villain, but I think truly it’s just people who are in pain, women who are in pain from being subjected to patriarchal societies.… But I think it’s a consequence. It’s a powerful demonstration of what others are inflicting onto women, taking away what they love.”

Zou added that she enjoyed being able to fully focus on each character’s voice and lines without any distractions.

“This really enhanced the experience because you could hear the pain, the anguish and the unheard story of many people and ultimately many women, all combined in one,” Zou said.

Hangret described her experience as both the playwright and director as a difficult experience.

“The hardest part about writing was thinking about what to add and what to take away. I wanted to add in everything. I wanted to talk about culture and everything. But, with the script, [I] had to condense it for my study,” Hargret said.

Fuentez, for one, found that Hargret’s hard work paid off.

“Oceana [has] a really cool director style where she’s very attentive to each individual. It was really fun working with her. Oceana is graduating, which makes me very, very sad, but she’s an amazing person, amazing director, and I hope she does amazing things,” Fuentez said.

Hargret hopes that her directorial debut imparted to the audience the power of cultures and diverse voices on campus.

“I hope [people who see the show] take away that culture exists at Bowdoin, and that there are many different people of color, women of color, who are actively fighting for voices and more voices to be heard at Bowdoin. Although it’s a [predominantly white institution], we do exist,” Hargret said.