"Vietgone" at ACT

ACT photo by Kevin Berne

This is a show I really liked in the 2016 season when it played at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. So I've been looking forward to seeing it again at ACT this year. The Strand Theater presents some interesting options and challenges for staging the show, though.

The Play

I just went back and read my description from Ashland, and I think it covers it pretty well. The play itself seems pretty much the same, but there are definite differences in the staging and directorial approach.

The Production

The relatively small stage at the Strand presents a challenge for staging this play, primarily because there have to be frequent changes of scene. Ashland handled this by staging the show in their black-box theater and just designating different floor spaces to represent different scenes. But the Strand has a traditional proscenium stage, so they used two adaptations: a rotating turntable that enabled relatively quick switches of scene and a minimal second story that bridged over the stage below, letting some transient scenes take place in a neutral space.

I thought that was pretty clever, but with some reservations about the implementation. From our perspective in the third row of seats, it was a bit of an effort to crane our necks up to watch the scenes above. And the frequency of scene changes necessitated a lot of rotation of the turntable, which I found distracting. But overall, I thought it was probably the best one could do in this space.

The acting was mostly strong. James Seol as Quang and Jenelle Chu as Tong are both solid, though Chu didn't seem very comfortable with the rapping portions of her role. All three of the other actors have to cover a fairly wide range of characters, particularly Jomar Tagatac, who excels in a particularly challenging swath. Stephen Hu does a nice job in the second-banana roles, and Cindy Im is mostly good, but I found her unconvincing (and too young-seeming) when portraying Tong's mother.

Differences

For those who saw the production in Ashland, there are several stylistic differences in this production. Perhaps most noticeable is that the comic-bookish, superhero style is missing. That was a conscious choice in the Oregon premiere, and I didn't really miss it. In Ashland the rap interludes seemed to come out of nowhere, but here they seem to integrate more smoothly into the flow of the play. I definitely felt like the motorcycle road trip, though using very similar bike props, suffered from the lack of space on the stage.

Overall

I still like the play a lot. In the current social climate, a play about the experience of refugees trying to adjust to a new country while missing their old home and family is particularly pertinent. One of my big takeaways from the play both times has been the expression of how differently the South Vietnamese and Americans viewed (and still view) the war in Vietnam. The poignancy of the final scene between Quang and his son, playwright Qui Nguyen, is wonderful.

The play runs through April 22, so there are still plenty of opportunities to catch it. It's far from a perfect production, but still very enjoyable.