Kalean Ung
Image: Kalean Ung in the stage production of Letters from Home
Interviewed by Minjae Kim
Minjae Kim: Many shows right now are caught in the limbo of being half rehearsed for a stage and being helplessly shoved into an online format. However, Letters from Home is an already fully staged production that toured and performed at a number of universities. What is the process like moving into the digital space? Are there unique challenges in adapting an already staged piece to this digital medium? Does it being a solo performance complicate the transition in any way?
Kalean Ung: Yes, correct! Letters From Home has already been performed in the flesh in the theatre, and we are currently transforming the play into a four camera live stream theatrical experience that takes place in my very own home office in Los Angeles.
A little bit of context- Letters From Home is a play inspired by the moment my father, composer Chinary Ung, shared with me a trove of letters from our family members in Cambodia who suffered through the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge. He had hidden these letters in his closet for forty years and only revealed them in late 2016 when I began asking him questions about our family. At that time, the US was experiencing a critical refugee crisis, and that spurred an urgency in me to create the play, sharing with audiences the struggles and triumphs my family experienced as refugees and immigrants to America. And it is still absolutely urgent for me to perform this play, and connect with audiences—even during a pandemic.
A beautiful thing about Letters From Home is that it is a solo performance about creation, and you witness me creating the piece inside my office; sifting through documents, photographs, objects and artifacts, drawing, writing, physically replaying or embodying characters, questioning and piecing together bits of information I’m receiving from external sources. In the play, the office I’m in can be a literal space, can be a liminal space, or a haunted space. We can travel to Cambodia or New York City in the 1960’s, but I, Kalean, the actress and writer, am inviting these dreams, these imaginings, these family members into my home, so the dramaturgy of now presenting the play from inside my actual office in Los Angeles is completely correct and potent. The heart of the play is the same, but now the audience, my closest confidant, and sometimes scene partner, is a camera hole. The performance practice is quite different; I don't have to project like I would in the theatre, instead, I think about the gaze of my eyes and continue to work on being simple and specific for the camera. I find that this version is much more intimate.
In this version it is actually incredibly gratifying to play with the objects and props more— there’s hand choreography and a specificity with papers that I get to engage with in these close ups. I get to allow my audience to see the frame-to-frame view like a movie. That detailed work is happening on the stage in the theater, but I don’t necessarily get to share with the audience my actual point of view of these objects. Of course, I don't have the immediate gratification of the sounds of the audience, but I also find that I don’t feel lonely or isolated either, I know that they are there with me.
Although we are doing video projection overlay, we are not implementing the green screen in the way many digital plays are doing right now. That is also the benefit of doing a solo play digitally—I do not need to match my environment with another person’s environment through means of green screening. So we are designing my office into a living, breathing space in which all of the magic I’ve written can take place right inside of it. Things can and will become animated through video, but the space is my space and this is thrilling. I know my team and I will learn a lot from this experience and I hope that actually the stage version will be deeper because of it.
The biggest shift in this medium is that there is no one to physically help me! I am in charge of all of the technology, cords, props etc. There's no stage manager on site, and I wrote hundreds of props into this play. (What was I thinking?!) During my pre-rehearsal I’m my own techie — so when a designer needs to troubleshoot something, it's on me to help solve all of the minutiae of this medium. I have a newfound appreciation for the intricacies and work in all of those departments.
We want to engage in this detailed way of storytelling that relies on a lot of technology, but at the core, it's about interaction with the audience. This is not the film of this story, though there might be a film in the future. Letters From Home needs to be live because this is a theatrical conversation that I share with my ancestors and witnesses. I hope this will be really fulfilling — both for audiences who have seen it in the flesh and those that are coming for the first time. I am truly letting you into my home, mind and spirit.
Kalean Ung in the stage production of Letters from Home
MK: How did moving to a digital medium influence the design choices (sound, projections/lights, etc.)?
KU: The biggest difference director Marina McClure and I learned when we began to translate the stage play to the digital play is that my office space needed to look like a heightened version of my office— any abstraction didn’t read as well and became confusing to the viewer. We needed to begin the play for clarity that this was my real life space, and because of that and the translation into a more filmic medium, the aesthetic of the theatre set needed to shift. The office will be a 360 degree designed space treated more like a production set and less like a theatre space. For me this version is extremely immersive in a new way. The audience will get to peak into all of the letters, secrets and family items through the camera. I hope it feels a little like going into a room like you would in Sleep No More and getting to be a voyeur- opening drawers and going through papers. That was the experience I felt after every show we did in the theatre- the audience wanted to come on stage and look at the set and at all of the items. In a way I am honoring their impulse and giving them what I believe they need. They need to see the items, they need to be with the letters, just like I did when I was first allowed access to them.
The other thing we are implementing into the set is using smart lights. Our stage manager and lighting designer are able to change lighting cues remotely—it is bizarre and there are so many creative things we can do in the office to create atmosphere and magic through lighting that is incredibly exciting.
Sound is the thread of the play. There is a musical score in a sense, happening underneath and activating the action. We are building a cumulative sonic landscape — my character is on a journey to uncover and understand my father’s relationship to music and trauma, to better understand him and myself. My character is asking for information while also experiencing darker corners where information is thrust upon her. Sound plays a huge role here.
To make all of this work, my sound designer, Chris is on zoom; sharing his computer sound (QLab) with me through my air-pods, and the audience. So what the audience hears, I hear. These sound cues are my scene partners. I’m immersed in the sound, but only through my headphones, it’s not playing in the physical room like it does in the theater (if my husband walked outside my door, he would only overhear my speaking). In all honesty, we feel like pioneers trying to fix these unique challenges in this digital landscape. We truly are inventing as we’re going— researching down the Reddit rabbit hole and speaking to colleagues with specific specialties, in order to find solutions for things that haven’t yet been done.
We have both advantages and disadvantages here as a solo play. Although we need to use Zoom to capture sound and for my Stage Manager to call cues, we do not need to use it to capture video. This is an advantage because Zoom does not have the capacity to capture/stream in HD at the moment, so any livestream play that is capturing video through Zoom is at a lower resolution. I can have all cameras in the same space as a solo performer so we are using another video capturing application called Ecamm to capture four video angles and this allows us to broadcast in HD.
The disadvantage is that Ecamm does not currently pair with bluetooth air-buds, only a physically tethered mic, and this is not ideal as I perform in 360º, traveling throughout my office. Furthermore, we are contending with a ten-second delay from live capture to HD broadcast, and it would be impossible to sync sound and video later, so sound has to come with me live from the original video capture, so we are still figuring out a hack to this issue. If you have a solution, please write to us!
MK: What is the vision of this piece? What do you want audiences to get out of Letters from Home? Have you found that moving to a digital medium has influenced your original goal?
KU: I believe that this digital medium of Letters From Home will be an even more intimate and personal exploration of the play. I want audiences to feel like I’ve taken them with me on this “heroine’s journey.” I want them to feel like I’m speaking directly to them as my closest confidant as I go deep into the layers of this story. I absolutely feel like this has influenced our original goal of creating the intimacy we want to create on stage for when we return to in person.
Much like we did on stage, by creating “close ups” and “wide shots” through lighting, we are doing this through camera angles. There is a different feeling to this especially when I speak directly into the camera, which is a lot different than breaking the fourth wall in the theatre. It is much more direct.
We are hungry for connection. And we need life-affirming things right now. So I’m trying to give a life-affirming artistic experience that shares family stories, and allows for people to feel connected to my family. In turn, I hope this will allow them to become inspired to investigate their own family stories, talk more deeply with their families, and begin a journey of healing. I hope this thread that was in the theater carries forward in this format.
MK: You have said that the show opened up an avenue for rewarding dialogue with students. How do you plan on continuing this conversation with the audience in a digital world?
KU: I never had an Asian (let alone Cambodian) acting or voice professor as a young woman and artist. Now that I teach in academia I have not had one Cambodian acting student. I want that to change and I will work to change that in whatever way I can. My hope is that performing to young people will be one facet of that change; representation matters and I want my audiences to be diverse and we hope to find funding that will allow us to connect with communities across the US.
I want to talk with students not only about telling their stories, but giving them the confidence to explore innovative ways to do so. Letters From Home speaks to a lot of the topics including intergenerational trauma, being second generation, coming from a family of immigrants, refugees and working to carve a space for yourself as a BIPOC that doesn’t fully exist yet in the arts.
We will be creating a syllabus and resource list for teachers and students to interact with when they choose to have Letters From Home be part of their curriculum. This would provide the historical context of the Khmer Rouge and the US involvement in it, history and resources about Cambodian communities in the US from 1980-forward, and the relationship to current deportations that are going on. I also hope to host a virtual exhibit of the letters, objects and artifacts that inspired and are a part of the play. These include letters from Congressmen, immigration paperwork and family artifacts. There will also be a list of questions and essay topics that students and teachers can engage with.
MK: Anything else you would like to share?
KU: The most common thing that happens after I perform Letters From Home is that audience members of all backgrounds and generations come up to me and tell me their family story and I am honored. I am grateful that I’ve created a space and a theatrical ritual for them to feel safe enough to open up to me. This play is also for the Khmer community, for immigrants, for refugees, and for healing. It has always been important for me to speak to lift all of these communities.
