Thanks for your interest in Threads: The True Story of an Indiana Farm Girl in Vietnam! If you have already seen the show, please take a moment to sign the Audience Guestbook. If you haven’t seen the show, I hope you will consider attending one of my Upcoming Performances.

In 2009, I had the pleasure of participating in the Winnipeg, Calgary, and Edmonton fringe festivals as an ensemble member of Inviting Desire: A Theatrical Aphrodisiac. I came home from the Inviting Desire CAFF tour inspired by the 50+ shows I saw over the course of the summer, many of them solo performances. It completely changed my concept of what theater is and can be.

I grew up in a Vietnam vacuum. My sister and I didn’t see our Vietnamese father very often, and he was our primary link to that part of our heritage. He passed away when I was 22. You hear about “G.I. babies” of the Vietnam War era, the children of foreign servicemen and Vietnamese women, but rarely do you hear about an American woman falling for a Vietnamese man. Indeed, though I have met many other half-Vietnamese Americans my age, aside from my sister, I’ve never met another person who was the offspring of such a pairing.

Aside from a couple anecdotal stories, my American mother didn’t talk about Vietnam very often. I spent most of my life feeling very disconnected from half of myself. So many questions…After the tour, I began videotaping interviews with my mother about her time in Vietnam; how she got there, why she went, what she did. I was surprised by the scope of her experiences and knew immediately I was onto something; these were stories that begged to be told. So I started piecing them together, and Threads: The True Story of an Indiana Farm Girl in Vietnam was born.

Threads debuted in 2011 at the Fertile Ground Festival and also ran during the 1Festival, both in my hometown of Portland, Oregon. I am looking forward to touring it in 2012 and beyond!

Tonya Jone Miller, playwright
February 18, 2012