"Vietgone" at Oregon Shakespeare Festival

OSF photo by Jenny Graham

We started off our second weekend at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival with what's in many ways a very non-Shakespeare play, "Vietgone" by Qui Nguyen. It is, frankly, not what I expected, which is fine. I'm not sure it's what anyone expected, in that it's really hard to describe.

The Play

I guess the best way to describe this is as a mash-up. It covers many different styles, with members of the cast occasionally stepping into rap for a while. Stylistically, it's kind of a mashup of Stew's laid-back personal history with songs crossed with "Hamilton"'s edgy rap (only much edgier, and less melodic), crossed with the sort of group-history that UNIVERSES put into "Party People" a few years back, but all more meta, as my daughter gleefully pointed out to me at intermission.

Plot-wise, it is somewhat more Shakespearean, if you were to mash up "The Taming of the Shrew" with "Romeo and Juliet" and add a little hero journey a la "Pericles, Prince of Tyre."

Ultimately, as the title suggests, it is the story of Vietnamese refugees (specifically the playwright's parents) coming to the U.S. after the fall of Saigon and learning to settle and live here and come to grips with the fact that they can't go home because "home" as they think of it is gone.

The Performance

That's a lot to bite off, but it's quite deftly done. The play features the two main refugees, Quang and Tong, with a wide variety of other characters played by an ensemble of only three other actors. In that regard, it's really quite brilliant. The timeline, such as it is, seems like something out of Kurt Vonnegut, bouncing around between and within periods before and after the fall, but it's handled clearly.

There are a number of set and prop moves that are really well done, with a small platform that serves as bedroom, dining room, shrine, and several other spots really well, surrounded by a fairly simple set that could be the great American open road, the yellow brick road, or a desolate Arkansas field or New Mexican desert. The period music from the late 60s was a nice touch.

Having done no research or reading coming into the play, I was expecting something about Vietnam and the difficulty of refugees settling into American society. But what Nguyen delivers is a view into how the refugees themselves saw their situation, how they dealt with it, and how they view it and themselves today.

The last scene quite masterfully puts the whole production in perspective, and really cements the piece.

Criticisms

I don't have much here. I thought the play was well conceived, well designed, and well performed. If anything, I thought some of the multimedia was more distracting than helpful, though that might have been an artifact of my sitting in the back row, so it was hard to see both the projections and the actors at the same time from that angle.

And I guess I'll solidify my standing as an out-of-touch Old Man when I say I thought there was too much gratuitous profanity. I get why Nguyen felt it necessary, especially in the "gangsta" rapping, but it just felt excessive. I got it; you felt like badass mofos. Let's move on.

But that was really the only things I felt detracted from an otherwise extremely well done performance of a very good new play. It made me think about things I thought I understood in a different way, from a different perspective, and that's what theater is for.