Image: Photo of playwright, Michelle Lee

Rice playwright Michele Lee, based in Melbourne, Australia, in conversation with Actors Touring Company artistic director Matthew Xia about the inspiration for Rice and working together over Zoom to bring the play to the Orange Tree stage this month.

This co-production features Zainab Hasan who plays hot shot executive Nisha working for Australia’s largest producer of rice and Sarah Lam who plays cleaner Yvette, who has her own entrepreneurial ambitions. The two form a powerful - if unlikely - bond as they navigate the complexities of their lives and the world at large.

Matthew Xia: How did you come to write Rice, and why?

Michele Lee: Rice is ostensibly a two-hander, a play between two female actors of colour. The starting point was thinking about my friends who act and who are women of colour over here in Australia, and asking: what cool roles could they play? Roles with versatility and virtuosity and range.

That was part of the impetus, a world that is peopled by bodies that are not white people and not men. But the characters also traverse a range of identities and the two bodies onstage jump between and transform across many different roles. Then, it’s a story about two people who become friends in a workplace, a white-collar worker and the person cleaning their office. They become friends.

In the Australian cultural landscape, when there are stories centred on the experiences of ethnic minority communities, they tend to tell the story of the family unit or the community unit, which of course is true, complex, beautiful and delicious. But I wanted to move away from that. It was important that the two characters weren't related to each other.

Matthew: The nature of that relationship was one of the things that first drew me to the play. They're not related to each other, but they attempt to fill gaps in each other's need for a home. Almost like a kind of maternal relationship.

Michele: That's so true. They do form proxies for each other, which speaks to living in cities where you find different types of community. And there is a dynamic in this friendship, which is family-like without being biological.

Matthew: I'm discovering in rehearsals just how dynamic this play is, its theatricality. We talk about “Page 36” all the time - because actor Sarah Lam moves around the stage and in one fell swoop she's played Yvette Tang, Tom Budd, Graeme Hartley and Gretel Patel. In one page, Page 36. The demands on the actors are huge aren't they? To give the physicality of another location, various ethnicities, different accents, whilst also delivering the story and retaining the central character each time.

Michele: Of course, you'll pull it all off with aplomb. And I hope it will be it will be magic. That's the plan. By the time we experience Page 36 on the stage, it will feel seamless.  

Matthew: The demands of the play limit who can play the parts because of age, ethnicity, history and authentic access to particular characters and relationships.  

Michele: Is the challenge for the actors how they locate themselves in the characters that are least like them?

Matthew: I guess so. I mean, let's be blunt. It’s something that Asian, East Asian, South-East Asian actors haven't been asked to do very often. More often than not they've been asked to play stock functional characters. Rice is asking the actors to inhabit full-bodied, 3D, emotionally true and rich characters that have been drawn with such detail on the page, and we have to honour that on the stage. The expansiveness of reach this play requires, to voice a Russian character, to voice a Caucasian academic businessman, different generations of one family - those are muscles that haven't been worked so often.

Michele: There’s obviously truth in that. It's the same here in Australia. We have a tradition of sketch comedy, and certainly that's a space where you do see like people of colour flexing their muscles. But there's a difference between that and what this play requires - landing emotional truth with the kind of swiftness the text is asking the performers and the audience to go along with.

Matthew: There's a line in the play that really strikes me, and this is part of the work I'm trying to do with ATC, and in our recent collaborations with the Orange Tree Theatre - we've been exploring migrancy and what it is to live in a place that is not your native land. It’s a line that Gretel Patel says: how can a civil servant best serve their constituents if they have a disconnect with their land? In that moment she's saying to Nisha: what are you doing here? You're not Indian. You're disconnected from your land. And I wonder how that registered for you? It's certainly something I feel with my own Jamaican heritage, which is kind of a distant idea that I only truly understand through my father, who lives here in England.

Michele: It's a tricky position to navigate. In the Australian context, there's some interesting and useful language emerging, even since I wrote Rice, around the settlers of this nation that aren't First Nations people, aren't British, aren't descended from First Fleet lineage - people like me. It's not necessarily the binary of: ‘you don't belong here’. For migrants in a nation like Australia, what does it mean to belong in a land that has its own history, and particularly in a land that has the First Nations?

Like Nisha, I find there are so many ways to ask, what is my place? Where am I belonging? And it changes every day. And you continue to negotiate it.

I've certainly had that experience of going back, for migrant people who have been raised in a culture that's different from the culture and the land that their parents were raised. What does it even mean to 'go back' when that origin is connected to you, but it hasn't informed your experience? I think part of the Nisha story is emblematic of a lot of migrant experiences here in Australia - the constant quest to answer, what does it mean to belong in this place called Australia?

Matthew: An island nation. And on this particular island, the UK, with the empire on which ‘the sun never set’, it is really important for us to be having those conversations about what Englishness is. What is it to exist here, when people have been British subjects elsewhere and then have arrived here and been mistreated, ill-treated.

Thinking about that, and the communities that these two characters come from, exist within - or sometimes against - would it be fair to say that both main characters in Rice are disparaging at points about their own ethnic groups?

Michele: Isn't that just part of living with a dominant paradigm where you are taught to hate yourself at times? We all wrestle with it. It's not always in the foreground. You feel a sense of difference, sometimes you internalise it, sometimes you vocalise it, and you learn to sometimes erase or diminish yourself - or those like you.

Matthew: It's almost a defensive action, isn't it, to be self-deprecating?

Michele: Totally. Get there first, before they do. And then there are the added layers of age, education or gender. There are so many reasons to resist: in their own ways, Nisha and Yvette both struggle, protest and rebel.

Matthew: Since the last time you popped into rehearsals on Zoom, we've been talking about Nisha's meanness. Is she mean, or is she direct?

Michele: I wrote a note to you to say: “oh, she's so mean.” And I thought, why? There’s that stereotype of a 'difficult women', and the gendering of assertiveness in young women. But in some ways, it is about that. It’s the collision of ambition and gender.

Matthew: I think the daughters in this play have immense pressure put on them from their mothers to do well. In Nisha's case, it's Didima, her grandmother. There’s a sense of responsibility, of – ‘my family have come here, and I have to succeed on behalf of them’.

Michele: Those two younger characters have this adrenalised, revved-up energy of pushing and propelling forwards, which is connected to expectations and responsibility and trying to do it on their own terms. Those elements add to the pressure and the pace.

Matthew: There’s something too about how the dreams of the first-generation migrant can only be achieved by the second or third generation migrant. It’s what Nisha’s carrying, and that’s what Sheree’s carrying as the ‘Made-in-Melbourne’ daughter.

Michele: I wonder if Nisha wants that kind of legacy - and at the same time feels burdened by it. But for Sheree, politically, she’s resisting, from all angles: family, capitalism, society.

Matthew: Who are the characters for you? Are they people you know, or have seen?

Michele: My background is Hmong, but for all intents and purposes, I appear as Asian. But I'm from a small ethnic minority. My mom was a cleaner, later in life. She raised seven kids and had a market stall. But later in life she was cleaning government buildings, and at the same time I was working part-time white-collar office job in a different city.

I would be working late, in the twilight hours and the cleaners would come in to do their shifts. I realised: this could be mom, or somebody’s mom or father. Yvette, as an older Asian woman, is limited in her opportunities. I connect to her through my mom. And then, fortunately, Nisha isn’t like anyone I know. I remember saying when I joined the rehearsals via Zoom, that when I was in that white-collar job and writing the play, I noticed these young, highly competent female leaders parachuting into senior leadership roles. I felt like it was something happening across different sectors, and it was cool, breaking the glass ceiling.  

Matthew: So there are bits of you in there, and bits of your mum in there, and I guess as the child of a migrant, it’s a universal story - it doesn’t matter which location you’re moving from, the moment you have to find a new home, there will always be some difference between your children and you. I’m thinking about Sheree, who’s Yvette’s daughter – she’s quite harsh on her mum.  

Michelle: For me that’s also a product of them only having each other, the extremities of emotions in a smaller family when there’s only two of you. That adds to the intimacy and also the intensity.

Matthew: I wanted to ask you what it was like having a premiere happening on the other side of the planet that you can only really access through Zoom?

Michele: It's so many things. I like that there are more people of colour in the creative team. I'm loving hearing about the way in which you're approaching this work.

It’s exhilarating, humbling, terrifying in some ways, because I don’t know what the British context for this is like. It feels a bit like the cool kids in England are putting on my play and I don’t know what they’re going to have to say about this play from Australia.
 
Matthew: It is a cool, very funny, very touching play. In rehearsals we’ve talked about it in a serious way, but it is hilarious as well. Thank you for letting us create the European premiere of Rice and in doing so, producing your work for the first time in the UK.

michelevanlee.com.au
matthewxia.com
atctheatre.com

RICE
Orange Tree Theatre
Opens 13 October to 13 November (previews from 9th October)
To book tickets for RICE  - orangetreetheatre.co.uk