Vietgone
Opening Night: October 25, 2016
Closing: November 27, 2016
Theater: MTC
Qui Nguyen’s (She Kills Monsters) new play Vietgone pulses with contemporary energy. It’s the classic story of boy meets girl – except this boy and girl are refugees from the Vietnam War newly settled in a relocation camp inside Middle America. Borrowing elements from the world of up-to-the-minute popular culture to recreate the playwright’s own parents’ meeting, Vietgone ranges from hilarity to heart-wrenching drama. Nguyen and director May Adrales (Luce) skip through time and around the globe to present a fresh theatrical take on a moving account of one real family’s history.
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October 25, 2016
In the online manifesto of Vampire Cowboys—a scrappy downtown troupe founded by playwright Qui Nguyen 14 years ago—you’ll find this item: “Vampire Cowboys never perform matinees. Matinees are for old people.” Nguyen’s latest play, Vietgone, is being produced by Manhattan Theatre Club, not Vampire Cowboys. And I may have dragged my ancient ass to it on a Sunday afternoon, but Vietgone is easily the freshest, most exuberantly youthful piece I’ve seen at MTC in ages: a punch-drunk mash-up of hip-hop, road movies, sex farce and Vietnamese-American history. Oh, also kick-ass fights. May Adrales’s high-octane staging moves so swiftly and surely, you may not initially appreciate the buckets of stagecraft she and Nguyen throw at us scene after scene. In design and pacing, the production ransacks the aesthetics of comix and grind house, applying their flashy framing and penchant for sex, drugs and violence to a dead-serious story of war, displacement and assimilation. Jared Mezzocchi’s vibrant, graphic-novel video projections and set designer Tim Mackabee’s collaged-locations set conjure the perfect cartoon atmosphere. For added spice, Nguyen includes rap monologues (beats by Shane Rettig) that invite favorable comparisons to Hamilton. Eschewing realism from the get-go, Nguyen has a Playwright (Paco Tolson) explain the rules of his world: Vietnamese characters speak in profanity-laced but precise English, whereas Americans’ dialogue is limited to, “Get’er done! Cheeseburger, waffle fries, cholesterol!” It’s not the first time Nguyen flips the cultural script for laughs and theatrical effect.
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October 25, 2016
For positive proof that in certain realms of theater, we have moved firmly beyond political correctness, see “Vietgone,” a raucous comedy by Qui Nguyen that strafes just about every subject it tackles and every character it presents. Sure, sometimes it wobbles uncertainly between satire and sentiment, but Mr. Nguyen’s fresh and impish voice rarely lets up as he thumbs his nose at our expectations. As the character of the playwright (Paco Tolson) explains at the top of the show, the principals are Vietnamese who become refugees in America. The show is set in 1975, but these characters, he says, won’t sound the way you might expect them to. Scanning the audience at City Center, where the play opened on Tuesday in a Manhattan Theater Club production, Tong (Jennifer Ikeda), a 30-year-old Vietnamese woman, observes, “Damn, there’s a lotta white people up in here.”
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