Unraveling an oral history

In 1968, Tonya Jone Miller’s mother got on a plane to Vietnam and walked into a dramatic unfolding of events, guided by love and family in a country devastated by war. Her mother’s story worked its way into the annals of their family, an oral history moving from one generation to the next, no less present than the characters it embodied. Forty years later, Tonya recreates this story for the stage, a personal narrative she describes as “stranger than fiction.”

After a year and a half of interviews, writing and piecing together history, Miller’s one-woman show “Threads” opens for the final weekend of Portland’s Fertile Ground arts festival. The festival is a collaboration of many artists across a spectrum of experience and backgrounds. Encompassing 10 days of theatre, dance, comedy, visual art and film, Fertile Ground focuses on new and innovative works by local artists and seeks to reveal the fruitful nature of Portland’s art community.

Miller has a decade’s worth of theatre production experience, and she worked with the premier Fertile Ground Festival in 2009 on the theatrical collaborative “Inviting Desire,” an erotic variety show exploring female desires and arousal. The show went on to do a successful weeklong tour with the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals (CAFF), a nonprofit organization that serves as an international infrastructure for “fringe” theatre. On this tour, Miller was inspired by other solo artists to work on her first one-woman performance piece. As the idea grew and developed, she imagined Fertile Ground as the ideal venue.

“Fertile Ground is a great outlet with a strong support network; I know the story’s going to get heard.”

Since the piece is based on a true and personal history, the core of her creation rested on family interviews.

“My mother is 66 now. This is her legacy, and she’s ready to talk.”

Miller spent over 12 hours engaged in heavy and emotional interviews with her mother, gathering elements of the history that she had never before heard. She also traveled to California to interview members of her father’s Vietnamese side of the family. The interviewing process both brought her closer to her mother and reconnected her with Vietnamese culture after many years of feeling detached from this side of her family history. It also illuminated the importance of folk narrative and storytelling in a world in which many people experience an increasing disconnect with their own familial and cultural histories.

“Because of the Internet, a lot of people have lost touch with oral history. Anyone can look up things about their families online. I want this story to be about personal connections, real people and what really happened.”

Miller tells the story through her mother’s point of view, intermittently playing the parts of others who were involved. While much of the story takes place in a war-riddled Vietnam, Miller is adamant that this story is not about war, but about relationships and interconnectedness among human beings.

“War is only an auxiliary character.” She goes on to explain that the real characters and their experiences are extraordinary because they are so universal. Utilizing theatre to impart the intimacy of oral history is an effective approach, which not only illustrates but also participates in the universal theme of human connectedness.

Miller plans to submit “Threads” to CAFF’s upcoming festival season and hopes to have the opportunity to take the show on tour. While this is her first one-woman show, she’s enthusiastic about its reception and has other ideas in the works for solo shows to come.  ?