Since Vietgone first premiered in 2015 at the South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, CA, playwright Qui Nguyen’s romantic comedy about two refugees from Vietnam who meet at an Arkansas relocation camp has attracted large audiences. Just a year later, in December, 2016, Seattle Rep hosted a sold-out production of this music-filled play, which reflects in part the experience of Nguyen’s own parents.
Now, Pork Filled Productions is teaming up with SIS Productions to give audiences another opportunity to see Vietgone. “A lot of the Asian American community didn’t get a chance to see it,” said PFP producer Roger Tang. “We hope we’re able to rectify that by offering it as a community-based offering.”
Back in 2008, PFP introduced Qui Nguyen’s work to Pacific Northwest audiences by presenting Living Dead in Denmark, which features zombies, martial arts, and Shakespeare. “In a lot of ways, Qui is a patron saint for Pork Filled,” Tang said. “His love for pop culture and genres like comic books, science fiction, and fantasy really aligns with PFP’s sensibilities.”
Tang reports that SIS Productions expressed an interest in staging Vietgone. “Whatever Kathy says to do, we just do,” joked Tang, speaking of SIS Productions founder and Executive Producer Kathy Hsieh. “Seriously, SIS and PFP have always worked closely together, we share designers and actors all they time, and we consistently swap out working on each other’s productions.”
Even back in 2016, Hsieh reports, SIS Productions began considering producing the show to make it available to a broader audience. “SIS’ artistic aesthetic has always been to produce Asian American shows that focus on relationships and that have a sense of humor in order to portray a fuller dimension of our humanity as Asian Americans,” Hsieh said. “And since SIS also strives to center the Asian American female experience, we also love that the two female characters are ultra-strong ones that don’t conform to the stereotypical depictions of Asian women.”
Tang’s own experience seeing several productions of Vietgone, including both the Seattle Rep and Oregon Shakespeare Festival productions, solidified the decision. “I caught it first at the National Asian American Theatre Festival, where it was akin to a religious experience, seeing an Asian American love story, with an Asian American cast at a heretofore white company with a primarily Asian American audience,” he recalled. “It was an amazing, uplifting experience that left indelible marks in everyone who saw it.”
Seattle Rep brought the OSF artistic team and cast to Seattle in 2016, but now, the new PFP-SIS presentation will be the first production of Vietgone cast with local Seattle-based performers. Actors Megun Huynh and Joshua Erme portray the young pair, Tong and Quang, who meet and decide to explore their newfound country through a road trip, some flashbacks, and a few rap songs. Directed by Mimi Katano, the two come to terms both with their escape from war and the loss of their previous life partners.
Driving the motorcycle is Quang, who had served as a captain in the 225th Helicopter Squadron of the Republic of Vietnam. “After saving many refugees during the fall of Saigon and flying them to America, Quang is determined to somehow return to his family in Vietnam, no matter the odds,” Erme said. “I think the most interesting thing about Quang is how determined he is, even to what many would consider a foolish degree.”
On the road with Quang, Tong focuses on the fun and pushes away any hint of love. “She stubbornly denies her own sentimentality and feelings, in the belief that love will weaken her will and risk her survival,” Huynh said. “As a survivor of war and as someone who is hyper aware of the fragility of life, she can only care about her familial relationships and can’t fathom extending more emotional energy in romantic pursuits.”
And although Tong can lean on her mother Huong, who immigrated with her, speeding away on a motorcycle with Quang is an appealing release. “Tong often feels like an inadequate disappointment since she’s still unmarried and childless at thirty, particularly feeling the pressure under the incessant, loving nagging she receives from Huong,” Huynh elaborated. “She never hears that her accomplishments are enough to make her mom proud, and is deeply reactive from being consistently reminded of her shortcomings.”
To prepare to portray Tong, Huynh has been reflecting on the stories her parents told about their childhoods and journey to the U.S. “I think about how hard it can be for my family and family friends to discuss their experiences fleeing Vietnam, and their difficult journeys, fighting to achieve a better life,” she said. “There’s a shared generational trauma of facing and escaping a horrific war, in desperately fighting their whole lives to ensure their survival, in yearning for a home that no longer exists as it did in their childhoods.”
While her parents always taught her to look forward, Huynh cites the importance of recapturing meaningful elements of the past. “I think of how my father recently was able to meet up with one of his cousins whom he hadn’t seen in forty years,” she said. “I think of how excited my mother was recently to get the chance to try a fruit, Sa Pô Chê, or Sapodilla, that she hadn’t had in decades, a fruit that used to grow right outside her house in Nha Trang.”
Likewise, Nguyen incorporates the past and present into his play. “Each of these characters have lost a part of themselves in coming over, and are actively and messily grieving their old lives throughout the show,” Huynh said. “Their rage, their emptiness, their pain, their loss bleeds into every single interaction with each other and tints their perceptions on the world.”
Meanwhile, Erme looked to playwright Nguyen directly to help prepare to portray Quang. “I watched a lot of interviews where Qui Nguyen talked about his parents,” Erme said. “I thought it was very interesting to hear that his parents were the ones who encouraged him to write this story in his own unique voice.”
Erme feels the special challenge of portraying a character who represents a real-life individual, and has come to understand the depth of feeling Quang has for the people in his life, including his best friend Nhan. “Sure, Nhan may get on his nerves sometimes but at the end of the day Quang is very ‘ride or die’ for him,” Erme explained. “In my own life, I’ve definitely got some friends that would take a bullet for me, and I see them as more brothers than just best friends.”
For Hsieh, the timing of this production post-pandemic has made the story resonate more deeply. “Throughout the pandemic, here in the U.S. and elsewhere, there was a significant increase in hate crimes and anti-Asian sentiment as people looked for a scapegoat to blame for Covid,” she said. “And many of those being physically attacked were the most vulnerable folks, our elders.”
Hsieh admits that even some Asian Americans may look upon their parents as being foreign, embarrassing, or not American enough. “One of the most powerful aspects of Vietgone is that it helps us see that everyone was young once, with desires and dreams and a story worth learning more about,” she said. “In bringing his parents’ story to life on stage, Qui Nguyen has made them multi-dimensional human beings, real people, imperfect but oh, so relatable.”
In particular, the play presents a particular perspective on American involvement in the Vietnam war. “We get to see what a Vietnamese soldier thinks about America fighting alongside South Vietnam,” Erme said. “It’s a very important message that needed to come out during some very crucial moments in the story, and I definitely felt some pressure to make sure I did my part to represent that.”
Presenting these struggles through rap music creates another challenging layer to the performance. “The lyrics are often deeply emotional and theatrical, and at moments textually dense,” Huynh said. “It’s been fascinating hearing how different people will approach the same bars and lyrics with completely different rhythms and breath patterns.”
Tang describes Vietgone as PFP’s most challenging show to date. “We’ve done projection work before, but not to this extent,” he said. “Adding in live musicians to the rap numbers, using them for choreography is a whole new level of sophistication for us, and we’re adding in extra board operators and rap consultants to handle the added, various experts.”
SIS Productions has played a big role in recruiting for this production of Vietgone, particularly as a training ground to mentor and provide opportunities for more women, especially women of color, to gain experience in decision-making roles. “Someone we hired and mentored for our recent production of Unrivaled and where she was in her first-ever Production Manager job, is now the Production Manager for Vietgone,” Hsieh reported. “And someone we brought on and trained as an Assistant Stage Manager back-up for Unrivaled will be running projections for Vietgone.”
Throughout the show’s run, PFP plans to host numerous featured nights at Theatre Off Jackson. “Pork Filled is a resident company at Theatre Off Jackson and we’re proud of that,” Tang said. “TOJ is a producing partner and is a key reason we’ve been able to do so much work that appeals to the communities we work with.”
These special nights include Closed Captioning Performances on August 10, 16, and 17, and a Relaxed Sensory Performance on August 22. Playwright Susan Lieu will appear as a featured guest during a post-show discussion on August 15, while PeaceTrees Vietnam will appear at the August 19 Industry Night performance.
Actor Huynh sees the community reflected in Vietgone and this series of special events. “I think of how tight knit the Vietnamese communities are, particularly with immigrants who attended the same schools and programs to assimilate into American culture,” she said. “All displaced transplants who yearned for a home they could not return to, they stayed connected with those who reminded them of home and built a new community to thrive in.”
Vietgone runs from August 9 to 24 at Theatre Off Jackson, 409 Seventh Avenue South, Seattle.
