The French playwright and director Caroline Guiela Nguyen grew up hearing accents from all around the world. Her Vietnamese grandparents and North African father both spoke French with one; in the Provence village where her parents had settled, Guiela Nguyen herself acquired “a southern accent so thick you could cut it with a knife,” she said recently.
But in the world of French theater — where standardized pronunciation is the rule — Guiela Nguyen’s early drama teachers didn’t want to hear a voice like this. “I was made to lose it,” Guiela Nguyen, 44, said matter-of-factly: It was as if “the accents and languages I’d heard around me just didn’t exist.”
Now, as one of France’s most original theater makers, Guiela Nguyen is finding a place onstage for those voices. Her production “Lacrima,” which arrives at the Brooklyn Academy of Music next week, features actors speaking in French, English, Tamil and French Sign Language, with a wide variety of intonations — a deliberate contrast to the polished neutrality forced on Guiela Nguyen as a young artist.
That contrast has made her a hit with both national and international audiences, and put her at the vanguard of a push to diversify French theater.
Her breakout 2017 production, “Saigon,” tackled the legacy of France’s colonial rule in Vietnam. A decades-long story of interconnected characters, told in a mix of French and Vietnamese, “Saigon” has been seen across Europe as well as in Vietnam, China and Australia; more touring dates are planned through 2027, and St. Ann’s Warehouse in New York said it planned to present the production in the spring.
“Lacrima,” which premiered at the Avignon Festival last year, also has a long list of dates in Europe and Asia ahead of it after a short run at BAM (Oct. 22-26).
Over three hours, “Lacrima” follows the making of a fictional royal wedding dress for a British princess, from design and couture in Paris to lace‑making in the French city of Alençon and embroidery in Mumbai. Through the personal and professional stories of the craftspeople, Guiela Nguyen exposes the sacrifices that go into such a high-pressure commission.
“We were watching a thriller,” Amy Cassello, BAM’s artistic director, said of the experience of seeing “Lacrima” in Avignon. She immediately connected the story, she said, with New York’s garment district: “I knew her work would resonate with BAM audiences.”
“Lacrima” was Guiela Nguyen’s first major premiere as the artistic director of the Théâtre National de Strasbourg in eastern France. Her appointment in 2023 made headlines: The Théâtre National de Strasbourg is one of France’s six national theaters, the top tier of publicly funded playhouses in the country, and Guiela Nguyen is currently the only woman to lead one of them.
Her arrival in the role was a homecoming of sorts. The playhouse has a prestigious drama school attached, and Guiela Nguyen studied directing there, graduating in 2008. Many of her closest collaborators, including her set designer Alice Duchange and costume designer Benjamin Moreau, both of whom worked on “Lacrima,” were fellow students.
Yet her memories of that time are bittersweet. “I loved making art all day,” she said. “But I felt a kind of sadness. At the time, there were very few nonwhite actors on French stages, and talking about social issues was considered a bit vulgar.” At one point during her studies, she added, she “fell out of love with theater. I thought it just wasn’t a place for me.”
One of the settings where she found solace was the Théâtre National de Strasbourg’s costume workshop. “It was a very comforting place,” Guiela Nguyen said with a smile. Now, as a director, she’s put the spotlight firmly on the work of its team of seamstresses. Moreau, her costume designer, created seven couture-style dresses to mimic the collections of the Paris atelier in “Lacrima,” and all of them were produced in-house — including the in-progress patterns and mock-ups of the royal dress.
Bénédicte Foki, a head dresser and seamstress at the Théâtre National de Strasbourg, described the process as “incredibly enriching.” In addition to putting her embroidery skills to good use — a rare occurrence these days, she said — Foki found herself onstage: Guiela Nguyen cast her as an employee of the play’s fictional couture house. “I was able to help the actors, show them what to do in a workshop, where the needle goes,” Foki said.
That approach is nothing unusual for Guiela Nguyen, who is known for placing nonprofessional performers alongside trained actors. In “Lacrima,” about half of the cast was new to acting when the work premiered.
To find them, Guiela Nguyen generally employs a film casting director, whose skills are especially useful when she is looking for performers from underrepresented groups on French stages. (Liliane Lipau, who plays an elderly lacemaker in “Lacrima,” was “street cast” in front of her home.)
These nonprofessionals have become key to the emotional realism that Guiela Nguyen seeks. “It creates a kind of imprint of reality,” she said. “These people still live in their language. They inhabit their way of speaking.”
Dan Artus, a professional actor who has worked with Guiela Nguyen for nearly a decade, said that the director had “this ability to guide everyone to act well, to find what to say, to put them at ease onstage.” In “Lacrima,” Guiela Nguyen cast Artus’s own mother, who had never acted before, to play his character’s mom. “She’s discovering the job I’ve been doing since I was 25,” Artus said.
“Lacrima” was initially supposed to focus only on a European couture house, but in the course of her research, Guiela Nguyen was alerted — via a 2020 New York Times investigation — to the role that Indian embroiderers now play in the supply chains for luxury goods. Her longstanding interest in the sinister side of globalization led her to include a subplot in Mumbai and to travel to the city to meet with embroiderers there.
The level of secrecy in which these workers’ labor is shrouded meant that, often, Guiela Nguyen couldn’t even approach them — much less see what they were working on for international fashion houses. In the workshops that did allow them in, she and her team were deeply moved, according to Duchange, Guiela Nguyen’s set designer. “It was the first time I cried in front of fabrics,” Duchange said. “I was overwhelmed by their beauty, even as their makers were being hidden.”
Now, two years into her tenure at the Théâtre National de Strasbourg, Guiela Nguyen is focused on bringing people who don’t necessarily speak French to the playhouse. Seven productions in the theater’s current season will be offered with supertitles in languages spoken by immigrant communities in Strasbourg, including Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish and Ukrainian.
And Guiela Nguyen continues to work on stories previously untold in France. In the next production that she will direct, planned for 2027, she will be onstage herself alongside other people who grew up with mixed cultural identities. “My dream would be to teach accents at drama school here,” she said. Then future French actors and directors wouldn’t have to be ashamed of their own.
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