Alley Theatre’s ‘Vietgone’ a transformative theatrical experience
Sometime in the past five years, America saw a fundamental change in the way it consumed culture. It’s impossible to say exactly when and where this took place, but around the year 2014, a flurry of events — peaking for about two years — made it so that identity and inclusion became arguably the country’s defining cultural topic.
What happened during those pivotal years? Black Lives Matter, founded in 2013, grabbed the nation’s attention. Donald Trump’s campaign changed political discourse. #OscarsSoWhite called out the movie industry’s exclusion of minorities. Caitlyn Jenner came out as trans in 2015. Landmark works of art, which include 2015’s “Hamilton” and 2016’s “Lemonade” from Beyoncé were released.
In October 2016, during the height of this “post-2014” moment, a play called “Vietgone,” by the then-relatively-unknown genre writer Qui Nguyen, was produced at the Manhattan Theater Club. It was funny, radical and empowering. Unlike the stereotypical “race plays” of the past, it didn’t portray people of color as symbols of trauma and tragedy. Artistic directors who wanted to say something about what they wanted their theater to be — modern, progressive, appealing to people of color and millennials — wanted this play.
Here in Houston, we are watching a new form of American theater be canonized in real time. The recent story of the
Alley Theatre, after all, is a symbol for what’s been going on in the country. Gregory Boyd, a Stanley Kubrick-style white male artistic director, leaves during the height of #MeToo following allegations of his mistreatment of women and is replaced by Rob Melrose, a director who, despite the bad optics of being another straight white man, has programmed in his first season not only “Vietgone” but also “Quixote Nuevo” (the first Latinx play ever produced on the Alley main stage) and Chisa Hutchinson’s “Amerikin.”
The play, in other words, presents a perspective that people of color in theater have been demanding for years.
“Vietgone” begins with “The Playwright” explaining to audiences that all Vietnamese spoken in the play is performed instead as colloquial English, while English spoken by Americans is gibberish, along the lines of “cheeseburger cowboy Richard Nixon.” What a brilliant re-centering of the Vietnamese experience. This happens again and again, when the characters in the play talk about homeland, food, immigration and love. “Vietgone” is a radical political statement dressed in the clothing of a romcom — a fresh expression of Vietnamese and Asian-American humanity that’s neither preachy nor pandering. Its Vietnameseness is so damn convincing.
And when I say radical, I mean that word to describe a work of art that attempts to shift a mode of thought that has existed for some time. The belief that a drama consisting of all white people can or should speak to the universality of human experience is the American theater’s most common preexisting condition. The protagonist Quang (a chiseled, charming Edward ChinLyn) is Nguyen’s answer to history, an archetype of masculinity who’s Vietnamese literally but American symbolically.
Quang’s a war hero and fighter pilot. He’s brooding, masculine and handsome. With his leather jacket and motorcycle, he’s none other than James Dean. And yet Quang is also utterly not interested in participating in the idea of American exceptionalism. He’s not in America to follow his dreams or live out the life of a mythic immigrant. Displaced from his home after the fall of Saigon, Quang is forced to live in a refugee camp in Arkansas. He is not enamored at all with America and longs to ride his bike to California where he can catch a plane back to war-torn Vietnam to be reunited with his wife and children.
Nguyen, basing this story on how his parents met, has taken a profoundly Vietnamese-centered story and turned it into an expression of American existence. That’s why intrusions of stylistic flourish — rap, fight scenes, overthe-top comedy — make sense. That’s why the nods to American rom-coms, used to tell the boymeets-girl plot of Quang and
Tong (a fierce and radiant Kim Wong), is pitch-perfect (credit to director Desdemona Chiang for a montage winking at “Dirty Dancing” and “The Breakfast Club”).
The actual play isn’t necessarily great drama. The rap is good. The romance is good. The depiction of wartime trauma is good. The fight sequences are good. Quang, accompanied by a loyal, silly sidekick (a hilarious and physically present Viet Vo), feels at times to be more a pastiche than fully-realized human being.
The play is satisfying, however, because the final scene is one of the best single scenes I’ve seen in American theater in a long time. It is just so real, so surprising, so gut-punch human, so elegant in exploring both politics and a father-son dynamic. The last scene is why “Vietgone” is being produced so much. It’s as if the entire play leading up to it was a fantasy, presented to the audience so they’re prepared for this moment of reality. Nguyen, through his father’s voice, in one monologue critiques the leftist American narrative of the Vietnam War and explores heartbreaking difficulty of intergenerational communication.
A son tries to talk to his father. A father tries to talk to his son. What could be more universal than the drama of family dynamics? I noticed that, even within the program, there’s a push and pull of what kind of play “Vietgone” is. Chiang says in the program it’s “the quintessential American road trip story,” while managing director Dean Gladden says it’s “a unique perspective on America through the eyes of Vietnamese immigrants.” How fascinating to see this play described as a universal American story, from one perspective, and as a unique Vietnamese story, from another — just one example of how complicated the play’s exploration of both literal and mythic Americanness is.
It’s not my job to read between the lines of program notes. But because “Vietgone” arrives at a pivotal moment in Alley history, it’s important to see if the majority-white audience of the Alley believes “Vietgone” is a wonderful story about “us Americans,” or a wonderful story about “them Vietnamese.”
In an era where context is everything, this means that the story of “Vietgone” in Houston is only beginning. This play has arrived, it’s fantastic, the all-Asian cast of actors are sexy, funny and relatable. Finally, a story is being told from the perspective of a group of people who historically have never been center stage.
Now what? What’s the lesson? Today, the audience is no longer passive. When we chat and post and read about “Vietgone,” we become the writers of its history. After seeing this pivotal play (which you should), we are thus granted the wonderful opportunity to help shape a modern story about the American theater. We, along with the play, are alive.