Review: Funny, Fierce, Fabulous Production of “Vietgone”

Vietgone by Qui Nguyen

Pork Filled Productions http://www.porkfilled.com/and SiS Productions

At Theatre Off Jackson through August 24, 2024

For a relatively small-sized set of companies to take on plays that challenge every part of a production – sets, casting, size of stage, ability to fund it, marketing – and pull it off so that everyone can be happy and proud of the achievement is a big deal. Pork Filled Productions and SiS Productions are two mighty, tiny companies that attempt such work. Their production of Vietgone is this kind of mighty effort and a huge “win” for our community because they have gifted us with the ability to see this play in person, again. 

Seattle Rep produced this play for us at the end of 2016. Having had the great experience of seeing that script live, I want to make sure everyone knows to try to get tickets for closing weekend! Fill those seats, folks. You won’t be disappointed!

As I wrote in 2016 about the script: “Write what you know.” That’s a lot of what people are told when they embark on writing anything and aren’t sure where to start. Playwright Qui Nguyen, in Vietgone, has done that in this trenchant, funny, hip-hop spouting, immigrant-experience-explaining road trip through the fall of Saigon and the evacuating of some thousands of South Vietnamese in helicopter rides to battleships.

“Vietnam was a huge mistake.” That is what most of us know, if we know anything about that war besides how badly the vets coming back were treated. From a U.S. point of view – and don’t we always take the truth from a U.S. point of view? – U.S. participation in and escalation of the war in Vietnam is looked at as a huge disaster. Partly because the reason for our participation, aka The Domino Effect, was only a theory and because so many of our young men died or were maimed for life. Money spent was thought to be wasted and we reached beyond our shores for bad reasons.

Also, “we” lost. We pulled out of South Vietnam in 1975 and they fell and it all became one communist country anyway. But there are other points of view.

Nguyen allows us to viscerally understand the feelings and experiences of refugees from Vietnam without bogging down in polemics or instruction. He uses foul language and hip hop songs that express feelings that can’t be said out loud. He finds a fun way to show what Americans speaking pigeon Vietnamese sound like to native Viet speakers (“cheeseburger” “Macdonalds” “America”).

The narrator-playwright (here played by Van Lang Pham) says jokingly that this play has “nothing to do with my parents” wink wink. While we have no idea what is fictional, we soon learn that this is indeed a story of how his parents both left Vietnam, though differently, and ended up in an Arkansas resettlement camp, knowing that neither could really go back “home” again. It takes a significant amount of script for his father Quang (played by Josh Erme) to realize that there is no way for him to get back to his Vietnamese wife and children.

The script is excellent at pulling the audience into Quang’s point of view. He feels a father’s responsibility and a father and husband’s pain of abandoning his family – a wife and two children who he could not bring with him from Vietnam in the evacuation. But his best friend Nhan (Hank Tian) helps him realize that if Quang did get back into Vietnam, he would never be able to find or help his family, anyway, and as a supporter of the U.S. effort, he’d be killed instantly or imprisoned and tortured.

A whole different example is posed by the playwright’s mother Tong (Megan Huynh), a young woman who looks at America as more of an adventure and, in a nod to the “sexual revolution” of the times, feels comfortable coming on to Quang just for sex, without feeling shamed or needing to make a romantic connection. Tong is the embodiment of a liberated woman. But she is also kind and smart and in a complicated relationship with her mother Huong (Wendy Chinn).

Mimi Katano’s directing generally keeps the play moving, since it’s a fairly long play (these days) at about 2 ½ hours with one intermission. Tiny quibbles would be that some scenes were too drawn out and could be tightened even with having specific emotional content, and a penchant for a lot of moving around of the open rectangles that became changed locations in the spare set by Robin Macartney. But the clever use of an almost non-existent motorcycle for a long cross-country journey was excellent, combined with significant use of projections by Nick O’Leary.

There was also original music composed for the productions and provided to producing companies, particularly special hip-hop lyrics that ably allow characters to express themselves when emotions overcome them. This cast is supported by a talented live band featuring Linus Guo, Shuai Han, Yuchen Zhang, and Josh Valdez, all musically directed by Yuelan. (Hold on for the moment they all become Ninja Assassins!)

As I said, there are more viewpoints than just the American one on this war. By the end of the play, you’ll understand that a bit more viscerally, and certainly will have new respect for the Vietnamese experience of some refugees here. All of that is exactly why we can be glad that Nguyen “wrote what he knew.” Hearing history written by those it affected is a powerful way to enlarge your understanding of our world!

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