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Dilara Ozserim

Welcome to In Conversation With Writers, the podcast where we dive into the minds of writers and explore their ideas and processes.

This episode is Part one of our conversation with playwright and writer Michelle Law, known for her insightful and thought provoking works that explore culture, identity and community.

This recording takes place on Dharawal Lands.

In this episode, we will be discussing one of Michelle's plays, Miss Peony, and her thoughts on dramatic form.

Michelle, thank you so much for joining us today. We're excited to learn more about your work and creative process.

Michelle Law

Oh, thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to chat to you.

Dilara

So let's jump right in. So we are here to discuss your play, Miss Peony. Now you are a prolific writer with experience composing across many different forms. What was it about Miss Peony that made you choose drama as the best way to tell this story?

Michelle

That's a really good question. I mean, I love experimenting with different mediums but I think for me, beauty pageants are really innately theatrical and very dramatic and they're very high stakes.

So I feel like theatre is the perfect space in which to explore that. There are also supernatural elements in the play, so I really wanted to experiment with theatre magic, but it's also a story about grief and, and culture and community. And I really wanted that to be experienced by a live audience where people were immersed in the story.

And I wanted that palpable sense of connection between people in a shared space. So that's why theatre felt like the right fit for this particular story.

Dilara

It's really interesting that, that you brought up that audience because that leads into our next question. So building on that idea of the audience, each audience does bring its own unique energy and perspective to a performance.

How did Miss Peony evolve or shift for you across the different performances?

Michelle

Each night or each matinee was really different. And that was really dependent on who was seeing the show for that performance. So you'd get audiences like that were predominantly from the Chinese community and so you'd hear those, you know, those gasps or sighs or laughter of empathy.

And it was also really lovely to get audience feedback post show, just from people reaching out on social media or even the theater passing on that feedback to me directly was really lovely. I'd have schools coming in, so high school drama students who were going to be studying the play, and they were really engaged with the playfulness and the silliness of the show, which was a lot of fun.

And then you had those audiences that come from more marginalised backgrounds and the show was very accessible. So theatre shows normally have maybe one or or two shows that are accessible to deaf or hard of hearing community members. But the surtitling element of Miss Peony made the entire season accessible. So you could see it at any time if you had those particular needs.

Dilara

So on that and on the choices that you made when writing the play for these audiences that, that you had in mind, can you talk to us about how you use form and dramatic devices to engage these different audience and convey the ideas about identity and culture that are present in your play?

Michelle

Hmm. I guess in regards to form the audiences know that over the course of the play, Lily's going to have to go on this external and internal journey, and that's to do with her identity and her culture. So somehow she needs to get from A to B and in this play I used sort of the very handy conceit of a beauty pageant or a competition, a structure that's really familiar to audiences, to keep those audiences invested.

Because although you know there's going to be a certain outcome, there's a lot of joy and excitement and in witnessing how that character gets to that stage. In terms of dramatic devices, I mean there's so many, so there's so many out there. So I'll, I'll kind of list a couple off the top of my head that felt a bit more palpable in this particular work.

Staging, I suppose the set was quite reminiscent of real life venues frequented by Chinese communities. Things like Blocking. So the character of Adeline, who is the deceased grandmother in ghost form and she appears to all of the contestants, they bow to her, which is something that in Chinese culture and, and other Asian cultures, you do to your elders out of respect.

Costuming, Adeline, uh, the grandmother character wears traditional Chinese clothing. She wears a cheongsam throughout the play, uh, as well as a jade bracelet, which is quite a traditional piece of jewellery that has kind of protective elements.

Metaphors. The poem that Lily recites throughout the beauty pageant is quite famous and it really speaks to the notion of home and Lily's sense of self.

Symbolism. The jade bracelet, the fan dance that Adeline performs and Lily's, I guess ultimately friendships with the other women all speak to her connection to culture. So they're the, I suppose, devices I used that felt most prominent in this piece.

Dilara

That brings us to the end of episode one of In Conversation With Writers with Michelle Law.

Be sure to tune in to episode two. If you like today's episode, please subscribe to In Conversation with Writers, leave us a review and share with your friends. You can also follow us on social media for updates and upcoming episodes.

Until next time, keep exploring the world of words and ideas.

[End of transcript]

Dilara Ozserim

Welcome to In Conversation With Writers, the podcast where we dive into the minds of writers and explore their ideas and processes.

This episode is Part two of our conversation with playwright and writer Michelle Law. In this episode, we will be discussing how language shapes meaning in Miss Peony.

I think an interesting aspect of this play is how you've been able to balance cultural pride and the complexities that come along with that, through your use of language and dramatic devices. So, elaborating on that, in what ways has your own cultural background influenced the language and perspectives presented in Miss Peony?

Michelle Law

Yeah, so I'm an Australian born Chinese person, so people call us ABCs. So, I've always felt caught between two worlds. I've never felt entirely comfortable with an Australian culture but I've never also felt entirely comfortable within Chinese culture.

So, I exist like a lot of people in kind of a liminal cultural space and I think complicating that fact is the fact that I'm what people call receptively bilingual. So that means, you know, I understand another language, which is in my case, Cantonese, but I can't speak it or I can't speak it very well.

And it's a particular frustration that Lily, the protagonist shares. And you know, I've experienced anti-Asian racism in Australia but I think when you belong to any minority culture, you also experience lateral violence within that community. So, you know, you can be excluded, you can be judged because you're not quite enough of that culture either.

And so, you can find yourself kind of throwing that judgment and that exclusion back. And what I wanted to do was, with this play, was really explore the perspectives of Chinese women of all different backgrounds and the prejudices that they have against each other.

Dilara

I think that's something that our students will really relate to. So I think seeing themselves in the text and different selves represented, I think is very powerful for them.

If we talk a little bit about the language that you used in the play to shape the characters and convey ideas, can you talk a little bit about that? Just any deliberate language choices that you made.

Michelle

Yeah, I guess the language choices were really born out of the characters, so for me, the characters always come first, and I spent a lot of time really carefully constructing each of those women.

So, you know, thinking about their age, their nationality, their sexuality, their upbringing, things like their class and their status, their values, and the sociopolitical environments in which they exist. So it helps when you know, and you are exposed to people who are like your characters. So you can kind of draw from the way that they speak and listen quite intently to the particular, you know, lilt of their voices or the vocabulary that they use, the syntax with which they speak.

So for me. Once you have that down, the character's voice can come quite easily and when you know that character well enough, you can start using the way they speak to shaped scenes and also the course of the action of the play.

Dilara

I think it's really nice how you've been able to represent different aspects of culture through these very different women in your play.

And I guess what I wanted to ask you next is in what way did you see these characters challenging some of the cultural assumptions that the play touches on?

Michelle

So I guess, because each of the characters are such vastly different people, I really wanted to challenge those cultural assumptions and they all have really vastly different manners of speaking despite all of them being the same ethnicity.

So for me, language in this play was very important because to make sure that their voices are distinct from one another and to really disprove any misconception that an audience member might have about Chinese culture being quite monolithic.

And you know, it's kind of evident even when you go to get groceries and there's like an Asian aisle. What Asian food exactly do you mean? You know, so really highlighting. Chinese people in particular for this play, they're not monolithic and that we're really diverse peoples.

Dilara

Yeah. I think you've done a great job of representing that in the play.

Touching on the idea of language, you did mention previously about the surtitles and that the show is performed or surtitled in the three languages: English, Cantonese, and Mandarin. So, how do these multiple languages contribute to the overall meaning and experience of the play, and what challenges and opportunities did this multilingual approach present for you?

Michelle

They're all really good questions. I'm gonna try and break it down into bit pieces in terms of the meaning. I mean, Chinese people speak so many different languages as well as in different dialects, which speaks to, I guess to the central dramatic question of the play for me, which is, is there a right way to be Chinese?

In terms of the way the surtitling and the languages influence the experience. What myself and the director of the show, Courtney Stewart, were really interested in doing was decentralising English for English speaking audiences and making them feel as if they needed to play catch up in the same way that, I guess culturally and linguistically diverse audiences can feel when they're going to see a play in Australia and English is their second language and even the way that we ordered the surtitles, I think English was second. That you had simplified and traditional Chinese characters kind of sandwiching that, so you kind of had to search for your language.

Challenges for the language in surtitling I think gaming the surtitling was kind of a technical nightmare because no one had done surtitling that we know of in a theatre show it, it's always done in opera, but we'd never seen it done in theatre before. And gaming the way that those surtitles appeared was really difficult, especially because it's a comedy. For example, you didn't want to present a line of dialogue too early because then it would be read quickly and it would ruin the joke, so if the people who weren't using surtitles and they were just listening to the language, they'd hear audience members laughing, but then not quite know why, and so it was just a bit disjointed.

Translating was also a challenging task because Cantonese isn't a written language, it's a spoken language. So there were a lot of close conversations between myself, our translators, as well as the actor playing Adeline. To ensure that the surtitles really capture the essence of what Adeline and Lily at times are saying.

I think in terms of opportunities, just making the play accessible to audiences from marginalised backgrounds who don't speak English or have varied abilities.

Dilara

I think that's really great. And on that, with all the challenges and the opportunities, do you have a favourite passage or a favourite section of the play?

I know that that can be difficult to answer, but do you have one?

Michelle

I think for me, my favourite passage or moment of the play is probably the Hotpot scene, which is where all of these women who have been squabbling and at odds with each other are brought together and are able to finally see each other's perspective and bond over this common shared food experience. And for Lily, the protagonist, it's really lovely for her because Hotpot is something she loves to do but it's something that she's never been able to do socially because she's grown up in an environment that's pretty monocultural and mostly white. And so to have that kind of familial experience with friends for the first time, I think it's really beautiful for her and I just like seeing them play their dynamic together in a playful rather than an antagonistic way.

Dilara

Yeah. I think it's nice because you have all of that tension throughout and then they come together and then they have that fight about who's going to pay and I think it's such a relatable experience. It's really interesting the way that food brings people together.

And I think another thing that this play does really well is brings in a lot of those symbols of those cultural gatherings, lifts the, the value and the importance of those. You don't need to have a crazy car chase scene or an explosion. These things are very powerful just as they are this everyday things. I think that's really lovely giving power to that.

That brings us to the end of episode two of In Conversation With Writers with Michelle Law. Be sure to tune into episode three.

If you like today's episode, please subscribe to In Conversation with Writers, leave us a review and share with your friends. You can also follow us on social media for updates and upcoming episodes.

Until next time, keep exploring the world of words and ideas.

[End of transcript]

Dilara Ozserim

Welcome to In Conversation With Writers, the podcast where we dive into the minds of writers and explore their ideas and processes.

This episode is Part three of our conversation with playwright and writer Michelle Law. In this episode, Michelle discusses her intentions and the impact of Miss Peony.

Just kind of feeding into that idea of what the play can mean to different communities. What key message about the power of language in shaping identity and community do you hope young people take away from Miss Peony?

Michelle Law

I think I'd like them to take from that, that when you speak two or more languages, you're really embodying different versions of yourself and that's because we're really different people when we speak different languages. Because those languages are so innately unique, whether that's the structure and the syntax of the language, the vocabulary that exists within that language. Because some, you know, for example, idioms or catchphrases or what have you, like they exist in one language but they actually cannot be translated in a way that it would even make sense or would probably remove the beauty or the essence of them.

And so there are some things that you are only able to embody in one language. Just because you are embodying different parts of yourself doesn't mean that you're being inauthentic. It just means that, you know, as people we can contain multitudes and that rather than that being something you need to feel embarrassed or ashamed about, it's quite, I think as you get older you realise it's a great privilege. And you learn that as well when you know as adults, a lot of people as a hobby are trying to learn different languages and to grow up with, or be born into a family that is already bilingual or multilingual, you already have a head start in that regard and have the capability to see the world in lots of different ways.

Dilara

So just sticking with our students, what advice would you offer to students who wish to explore and express their cultural identities through language and through writing and creating art?

Michelle

Yeah, I think that's a really good question. And it's something that I definitely wasn't able to do when I was younger, I think because no one asked me too, or, you know, I never thought it was really something valid to write about. And so my advice would be, you know, write the world as you see it and you experience it.

I studied creative writing at university and I got taught very particular voices and so I was taught, you know, a very male, white, older POV (point of view) when it comes to at least literature and I left university thinking that I kind of had to replicate that voice in order to have a successful career as a writer or to feel like I was writing well.

And it took a lot of time to, you know, kind of re-educate myself on lots of different types of writers and lots of different types of writing styles to realise that's what I wanted to do. And that's what made me feel, I guess, authentically like a writer, I would say it's pretty easy to get carried away writing in a style that you think befits playwriting or being a playwright, but that style mightn't necessarily feel right to you and your cultural identity.

And so I think good writing comes from a place of awareness and truth. The more that you can kind of embrace your own truth, the better you become as a writer.

Dilara

Embracing truth can be challenging sometimes for anyone, but especially for young people trying to figure out who they are and what that voice is and that idea of authenticity that you brought up. So what does it mean to be authentically me and authentically part of this culture or these cultures? And I think that can make for some quite interesting writing but also be quite challenging for our students.

You've had a bit of time and space from this play now. If you think about what your intention was when you set out to write this and then it was performed and you got that feedback and now having some time away. Have your feelings about it changed at all? Is there anything you look back on, you're like, oh, that's really great, I like that or maybe I would do this differently?

Michelle

Yeah. I think what I'm happiest about, and I suppose proudest of with the play is what we achieved with the languages and the surtitling because it was such a gargantuan task and we didn't have anything to refer to as an example.

Because Miss Peony, because it took such a long time to get staged because of COVID and other sickness and cancellations and things like that, it got staged more recently than other plays that I'd written.

So this was the second play that I'd ever written and I wrote it in response to Single Asian Female, when my own grandmother came to see the play and she didn't speak English. She sat in the back and she watched it all and enjoyed it but she came up to me afterwards and she said, oh, you know, it's really lovely what you've done, that audiences are engaging with your work but I didn't understand any of it. And that really broke my heart because I wanted her to be able to see and experience a piece of theatre in a country that she'd migrated to and feel like that was a world in which she could engage with. And so when it came to my second play, I really wanted it to be something that could be accessible to as many people as possible and something that was worthwhile bringing, you know, really busy Chinese parents to, because they don't see much value potentially in going to a theatre or spending money on theatre tickets when they could be working or, you know, doing something else.

So I'm really proud of that aspect of it and that we were able to pull it off despite all of the challenges. In terms of things that I'd want to change, I think no draft is ever really finished and it only ever feels complete when you kind of have the published thing in your hands. But there are so many different versions I think of who Lily could have been and what life experience she could have come from and even the pop culture references that she had. I mean, I think even till the last minute I was kind of like, you know, trying to figure out what is her actual passion or you know, what is it that's driving her in this life? And I think when it came down to it, those things were relevant, but not for this story.

Dilara

Thank you so much for that. Michelle, it has been a pleasure to have you join us and thank you so much for sharing your insights into Miss Peony and your writing process.

Michelle

Thank you so much for having me. I hope it's helpful.

Dilara

That brings us to the end of episode three of In Conversation With Writers with Michelle Law.

If you like today's episode, please subscribe to in Conversation with Writers, leave us a review and share with your friends. You can also follow us on social media for updates and upcoming episodes.

Until next time, this is your host signing off. We look forward to you joining us in our next episode and keep exploring the world of words and ideas.

[End of transcript]