She Has a Name is a play about human trafficking written by Andrew Kooman in 2009 as a single act and expanded to full length in 2010. It is about the trafficking of children into sexual slavery and was inspired by the deaths of 54 people in the Ranong human-trafficking incident. Kooman had previously published literature, but this was his first full-length play. The stage premiere of She Has a Name was directed by Stephen Waldschmidt in Calgary, Alberta in February 2011. From May to October 2012, She Has a Name toured across Canada. In conjunction with the tour, A Better World raised money to help women and children who had been trafficked in Thailand as part of the country's prostitution industry. The first performances of She Has a Name in the United States took place in Folsom, California in 2014 under the direction of Emma Eldridge, who was a 23-year-old college student at the time.
The script calls for five actors to portray ten characters. The two main characters are Jason, a young Canadian lawyer; and Number 18, a young female prostitute who claims to be fifteen years old and has been a prostitute for six years. The drama centers on Jason's infiltration of a brothel ring that is trafficking girls into Bangkok. Jason comes to believe that Number 18 could be a key witness to a human trafficking incident and tries to gain her trust and persuade her to testify against the ring. The victimized child in the play is known only by the number 18 to reflect how traffickers often dehumanize their victims by giving them a new name or simply a number, which in some cases is branded onto the victim's body. Waldschmidt said he hoped that She Has a Name will educate Canadians about human trafficking and motivate them to act on what they learn, thereby turning them into anti-sexual slavery activists.
She Has a Name received strong endorsement from Canadian activists, including MP Joy Smith, Ratanak International's Brian McConaghy, and IJM Canada's Jamie McIntosh. The play's premiere and initial run were critically acclaimed. In the 2012 tour across Canada, She Has a Name was performed in several fringe theatre festivals, at which critics representing the Montreal Gazette, the Winnipeg Free Press, and CFEQ-FM said it stood out for its quality and moral content.
Background
She Has a Name was the first full-length play by Andrew Kooman, a playwright and author from Alberta in western Canada.For Kooman's nationality and home province, see For the fact that She Has a Name was Kooman's first full-length play, see He began work on it in 2008 and finished a one-act version by 2009, writing under the guidance of a dramaturge at a Scripts At Work workshop at Red Deer College.For the date that Kooman started writing the play, see For the date that Kooman finished the one-act version, see For the workshop at which Kooman worked on the one-act version, see For the location of the workshop, see He drew on his experiences working with a Canadian film crew in Thailand in 2006. He intended to extend the script into a full-length play eventually. Kooman had previously written other literary works, including the young adult novel Ten Silver Coins: The Drylings of Acchora, and two plays, Shelter and Joseph, that had been selected for development at Scripts At Work workshops.
Kooman first became aware of human trafficking while he was working for the nonprofit organization Youth With A Mission (YWAM) in southeast Malaysia, where he met children who had been trafficked.For Kooman's first introduction to human trafficking, see For the location of Kooman's YWAM work, see Kooman later realized that people are also trafficked in Canada. Kooman wrote She Has a Name with the intention of bringing attention to this issue, specifically in connection with sexual exploitation.
To ground the play in reality, Kooman researched human trafficking and met with survivors. He read about the Ranong human-trafficking incident, in which 121 people were trafficked from Burma to Thailand and left in a locked water tank, which was then abandoned by its drivers and discovered only after 54 of the people had died from suffocation or hyperthermia.For the time of Kooman's reading about the incident, see For the locations and number of victims involved in the incident, see For the type of container in which the victims were held, see For the number of victims who died in the incident, see For the assertion that victims died of suffocation, see For the assertion that victims died of hyperthermia, see The truck carrying the water tank had been abandoned because it ran out of fuel. When the truck was discovered in April 2008, it contained men, women, and children.For the time of the truck's discovery, see For the assertion that some of the victims were men and women, see For the assertion that some of the victims were children, see Knowing that many of the impoverished girls who are smuggled in this manner become enslaved in brothels as child prostitutes, Kooman used the incident in the backstory of the play.For Kooman's identification of the Ranong human-trafficking incident with child prostitution, see For Kooman's appropriation of the Ranong human-trafficking incident for the play's backstory, see
In January 2010, there was a full reading of the one-act version of the play. Despite an unfinished script and a performance by amateur actors, it evoked a strong response from the audience. Later that year, Stephen Waldschmidt, an artistic associate of Burnt Thicket Theatre, asked to read the script of She Has a Name, and later said he could not put it down.For Waldschmidt's position and request, see For Waldschmidt's statement about the script, see He was initially reluctant to attach himself to the play because of the immensity and ugliness of the issues therein, but he ultimately worked with Kooman to expand it into a full-length play with an extra hour of material by the end of 2010. The result is a play that can be performed in 90 minutes but may last up to two hours.For the shorter performance time, see For the longer performance time, see Burnt Thicket Theatre served as the play's initial production company.
Characters
There are ten characters in She Has a Name, but the script calls for only five actors, four female and one male.For the number of characters and the number of actors, see For the gender information, see The main characters are Jason and Number 18. Jason is a young, Canadian lawyer with experience in corporate law. He found this work unsatisfying, so he started working in international human rights law for the United Nations and a non-governmental organization (NGO) that opposes sex trafficking. Number 18the play's heroineis a young, female prostitute who claims to be fifteen years old and has been a prostitute for six years. Ali is Jason's wife, and they have two young daughters. Marta is Jason's employer, who has become very tough from years of fighting for justice and who is now driven and stressed. The other characters are a pimp, who is unnamed, and his assistant, a cruel brothel keeper called Mama.
The script calls for one actor to play both male charactersJason and the pimp. Jason and Number 18 are haunted by four voices. As poetic and prophetic voices, these characters serve much the same purpose as a chorus in Greek tragedies, according to reviewer Lana Michelin of the Red Deer Advocate. Variously considered angels or ghosts, the voices are written in the script to be played by the female actors who portray Number 18, Marta, Ali, and Mama.For the assertion that the voices are angels, see For the assertion that the voices are ghosts, see For the actors who portray the voices, see While these voices sometimes emphasize the horrors of the sex industry, at other times, they offer comfort to Number 18. It is only revealed at the play's conclusion that the chorus is made up of dead child prostitutes.
Plot summary
A pimp rapes Number 18 in a bar, then enslaves her sexually. Number 18's father died when she was young and her family struggled to support her thereafter. Strangers took her from her home in Cambodia as a child, replaced her name with a number, and prostituted her in various countries. Number 18 ends up in the Thai child prostitution industry. Most of her clients are rich men, many of them foreign tourists. In a brothel and bar called The Pearl, Number 18 is kept in a dark room containing only a table and a dilapidated bed. Whenever she fails to follow the orders of Mama, the brothel-keeper, Mama shouts at her and beats her. Number 18 prays for a man to come and save her from these ordeals. At the same time she becomes the most elegant and highly sought-after prostitute at The Pearl and her pimp's favourite. She becomes very proficient in pleasing men sexually but also remains childlike—she dries her face with her skirt and plays with its hem.
Jason starts work with an NGO in Thailand, having left his wife and children in Canada and abandoned a lucrative job at his father-in-law's legal firm. He communicates with his wife Ali over Skype. Jason's first task is to find witnesses to or survivors from a human-trafficking incident and then to shut down the brothels into which they have been trafficked; his boss Marta sends him into the brothels as she cannot enter herself. His specific focus is an Asia-wide brothel ring's trafficking of girls into Bangkok for prostitution as part of the child sex tourism industry. An abandoned storage truck has been discovered containing the bodies of dead sex workers. Attempting to build a legal case against the brothel ring, Jason pays to see prostitutes in the hope that one of them witnessed the incident. The first prostitute he sees is Number 18, whose attempts to seduce him make him uneasy. Thinking Number 18 could be a key witness, he tries to persuade her to testify. The other prostitutes Jason encounters are too afraid to give evidence. Number 18 answers some of Jason's questions about where she is from, where she has worked, and how long she has been working, but only on the condition that Jason pay 100 baht for each response. She reveals that she has been prostituted in Thailand and Malaysia.
It is revealed that Number 18 was one of the girls in the storage truck, but that she escaped and ended up at The Pearl. Traumatized, she does not understand what Jason wants. She knows that every girl who has talked about the storage truck incident has been killed and is therefore reluctant to testify. One night Number 18 is injured in a party at the brothel and can barely walk when Jason visits. When he tells Ali about his experiences, she begs him to come home, but Jason believes he is in Bangkok by divine providence. Number 18 comes to understand that Jason is not like the other men who frequent The Pearl, and agrees to trust him and testify against the brothel ring if he can rescue her.
Jason pays Number 18's pimp enough money to take her out of the brothel for a weekend. Before he arrives to take her away, however, Mama finds and confiscates the money Jason has previously paid Number 18, and correctly guesses that he does not intend to bring her back. When Jason arrives to collect Number 18, Mama tells him she is dead and offers a refund. Believing Number 18 is still alive, Jason becomes violent. Mama mocks him, saying the Western culture he is part of is hedonistic and responsible for people in the Third World being sexually trafficked. Jason stops short of hurting Mama and leaves to report to Marta. Through her connections, Marta discovers that Number 18 is alive. Marta tries to save Number 18, posing as a lawyer protecting Number 18's rights. The pimp forces Marta off with a gun. When Jason makes another attempt to rescue Number 18, the pimp kills her. Number 18 joins the chorus of dead child prostitutes who have been watching over and commenting on events throughout the play.
Productions
Initial run