What unbeautiful realities lie beneath the glittering surfaces of the gowns most of us only dream about?
“Lacrima,” a play with a brief run in late October at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, written and directed by the French theater maker Caroline Guiela Nguyen, turns couture inside out.
The play chronicles a fictional Paris fashion house, the Maison Beliana, as it creates one magnificent dress — the wedding gown for “The Princess of England,” a title meant to conjure any one of the highly visible, glamorous royals admired by millions.
“Everyone has their own image of who this is,” said Ms. Guiela Nguyen in an interview.
But in the production, the Princess is invisible, appearing only as a disembodied voice. And the star director the fashion house, the imperious and demanding Alexander appears as a video image. Only the workers appear as flesh-and-blood realities. Ms. Guiela Nguyen showcases the normally unseen people responsible for the splendors enjoyed by an elite few.
She became interested in themes of secrecy and violence after observing group therapy sessions for female survivors of domestic abuse. “I realized that secrets are the condition of violence. That is, violence continues because it is kept secret,” Ms. Guiela Nguyen said. Later these topics merged with her interest in fashion. “I thought, ‘could I tell a story of a dress that cursed anyone who touched it?’” she said.
The result was “Lacrima” — in which the magic of a princess’s beautiful dress derives not from a fairy godmother’s wand but from the blood, sweat, and tears of workers. (The word Lacrima translates to “tear” in Latin and Italian.)
A “large, fresco-style” tale, as Ms. Guiela Nguyen calls it, “Lacrima” unfolds with multiple overlapping stories set in four cities and four languages: English, French, Tamil, and sign language, with onscreen supertitle translations. Ms. Guiela Nguyen lives in multiple languages and cultures. She was raised in France, and is the daughter of an Indian-Vietnamese mother and an Algerian-Jewish father.
In the play, the dress is mainly constructed at the Maison’s Paris atelier, which is supervised by Marion (Maud Le Grevellec), the harried première, or studio head, who is trapped in an abusive marriage. The embroidery is outsourced to Mumbai, where only one man, the aging Abdul (Charles Vinoth Irudhayaraj), is deemed skillful enough for the job of artfully hand-stitching 230,000 tiny pearls, one by one, to the garment.
The gown’s lace veil, borrowed from a museum, is sent for restoration to Alençon, France, a town famous for its lace-making traditions. There, a handful of women sit silently, knotting silk threads finer than a human hair.
Together, the crews must produce perfection under very unmagical constraints: an impossible deadline, outrageous design specifications and the limitations of their overworked bodies. We witness the psychological toll extracted — families estranged, children overlooked, abuse denied — all in service of “the dress.”
Ms. Guiela Nguyen has done careful research, and “Lacrima” vibrates with authentic history and details she unearthed in real workshops in Mumbai and Alençon and couture studios in Paris. At one point, all stage action stops, save for Abdul sewing individual pearls for about two minutes.
“I love that part,” said Ms. Guiela Nguyen. “It says, ‘Look, this is the time we’re talking about here. Time we cannot grasp when we just look at a dress.’”
Looking at a dress, we also cannot see the bodily damage it might cause, specifically blindness brought on by years of unrelenting eye strain under poor conditions. Driving home this point, for much of the play, Ms. Guiela Nguyen keeps Abdul silently present onstage. Nearly blind, he needs to bend so close to his embroidery that his face almost touches the fabric. His own vision, we learn, has been sacrificed to create beautiful visions for others. Later, his supervisors discuss his imminent firing right in front of him, in French and English, languages he does not speak. The moment conjures the painful legacy of colonialism.
“The people who are the least seen are usually those who do not speak the dominant language,” Ms. Guiela Nguyen said.
Multiple other narratives unspool in “Lacrima,” but even amid its many painful elements, it’s also a play about immense pride and dedication. The work seems nearly to kill some of the workers, but it also bonds them in the shared love for their art. The play also highlights the importance of relationships between women, specifically two friends who protect each other; a young lace-maker following in her mother’s footsteps; and the daughter who saves her mother’s life.
Fashion has long connected women, and “Lacrima” reminds us of the special connection sustained, not by the outer spectacle or the costly luxury, but instead by the human talent, labor, care, and time invested in it all. This is art revealing art, which Ms. Guiela Nguyen knows well. She considers herself a creator much like those she depicts: “Few people realize this,” she said, “But I wrote ‘Lacrima’ like an embroidery.”
Rhonda Garelick writes the Face Forward column for The Times’s Style section. She is the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Institute for Public Humanities at Hofstra University, where she is also the John Cranford Adams Distinguished Professor of Literature.
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