“Lacrima” was part of the Crossing the Line Festival 2025. (Courtesy: Jean Louis Fernandez)
“Je respire, tu respires (You breathe, I breathe).” These words, repeated by the protagonist’s daughter at a decreasing pace to echo her mother’s weakening heartbeat on stage, mark the electrifying start to Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s “Lacrima,” which ran from Oct. 22 to 26, 2025, at BAM Strong in Brooklyn as part of L’Alliance New York’s Crossing the Line Festival.
That protagonist is Marion, the head seamstress of the design house Maison Beliana, overseen by the mercurial and manipulative creative director Alexander. At the play’s start, she has just attempted to end her life by overdosing on prescription medications after failing to deliver a wedding dress for the Princess of England—a satin and silk organza ensemble with a lace veil and a train embroidered with 150,000 pearls. The play flashes back from this near-mortal moment to explore how the gown’s creation involved the atelier’s collaboration with the legendary lacemakers of Alençon and the master embroiderers of Mumbai—an eight-month assignment that could have catapulted the haus to international fame.
“Lacrima” begins as a story of ambition, tradition, perseverance and vision but, over three hours, slowly unmasks itself as a tale of the tantalizing temptation of fame and fortune, the lengths people will go to achieve them, and the destruction wrought by an exploitative and extractive industry. The play moves between countries, as the central story—the creation of the dress across the three workshops—begins to take shape. A gripping musical score with staccato basslines during tense moments mirrors the audience’s own fluctuating heartbeats. Hanging above the stage, a giant split screen grants viewers a zoomed-in view of the intricate craft scenes, making the audience feel like they are right in the workshop watching the delicate handiwork up close.
As the characters meet to examine fabrics, sketch designs, and make decisions, their motives emerge. Alexander wants fame and money; Marion wants the atelier to be recognized for its excellence; the lacemakers of Alençon want to spotlight their work in the hopes that such recognition would revive interest in the dying craft; the embroidery house in Mumbai wants the revenue and the prestige of the commission.
Midway through the story, one of the workers who has toiled over the gown comments that when people see a dress, all they see is a finished garment. But to its creators, it represents blood and tears. (Lacrima means “tears” in Latin.) As the story moves forward, things begin to unravel like stray threads on a garment. Marion’s envious husband turns abusive and lashes out in reaction to feeling inferior to her; Thérése, one of the lacemakers, is forced to confront the long-buried death of her unwell sister when her granddaughter begins exhibiting the same troubling symptoms; Abdul, the embroiderer, painstakingly toils away at his station even as his eyesight begins to deteriorate, a condition he hides from his daughter. Each of these characters moves through the play weighed down as much by the giant task before them as by the secrets they continue to keep—until they don’t. Marion finally reaches out for help and Thérése for closure; only Abdul is helpless, and ultimately, completely expendable.
As turmoil mounts across countries and workshops, the gown remains on a dressmaker’s dummy on stage, slowly evolving as details are added to it by silent atelier workers—a symbol of continuity in chaos, much like the monarchy it aims to represent. It’s a marker of how the pursuit of profit will take precedence over all else in a capitalist society.
In recent decades, the bulk of the Western fashion industry moved production to the Global South and Southeast Asia to reduce labor costs, according to McKinsey, birthing fashion hubs that became leaders in their métier. Mumbai, for instance, is the embroidery capital of the world; many of the world’s top luxury brands turn to India’s financial capital for their embellishment needs as Bloomberg and Forbes note.
Abdul represents this West-East relationship. Everything about him represents the power dynamic in the global fashion industry: from his onstage position, which is tucked away, nearly always out of sight upstage or far to the side, to his unceremonious firing when his failing eyesight renders him a “risk” to the overseers who worry that his compromised vision might cause mistakes. But Abdul is not the only casualty. His boss, Manoj, the workshop owner, is forced to abruptly replace Abdul, a long-serving employee, with another craftsperson. His authority in his own shop is overridden, and he emerges as just another pawn in this postcolonial powerplay. As Manoj laments, the West wants everything on its terms and doesn’t care what—or who—is lost in the process.
Led by Maud Le Grevellec’s powerful performance as Marion, the cast of “Lacrima” deftly steers the audience from grief to joy to anger to silent contemplation. The story uses a wedding—that most universal of celebrations—to highlight exploitation and unjust practices that place craftspeople at the very bottom. The clever use of the princess as an offstage narrator represents the invisible hands of powerful societal institutions. The play also reinforces long-accepted power structures that continue to allow extractive Western postcolonial practices to proliferate. But by inviting the public to look beyond the glamor and into the system’s guts, “Lacrima” encourages the audience to contemplate who is expendable (Abdul, who is now blind, disappears) and who isn’t (Marion, who makes a full recovery) in an industry that is more concerned with its profit than its humanity.
About the author(s)
Neville Bhandara is a student at the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University. He writes on culture and lifestyle and most recently served as the Copy DIrector at Vogue India.