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''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 that 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.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「She Has a Name」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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