Inside A.C.T.

By Taylor Steinbeck From Platoon (1986) to the Rambo series (1982–2008) to Miss Saigon (1989), “the main protagonist is always a white guy going to Vietnam and [the] Vietnamese are the bad guys being shot at or they are the people who need saving,” said playwright Qui Nguyen in a 2016 Rolling Stone interview. So Nguyen created Vietgone as an antidote to the “white savior” tale. Its characters are proudly Vietnamese and fully capable of saving themselves. By giving his characters dimension and agency, Nguyen attempts to reclaim how Vietnamese people have been represented on stage and screen, and makes them the heroes of their own story. Tong (Janelle Chu) flirts with Quang (James Seol) in A.C.T.'s 2018 production of Vietgone . Photo by Kevin Berne. In Miss Saigon , “Vietnam is a place not worth saving, and America is a holy grail worth killing and dying for,” writes journalist Diep Tran in her American Theatre magazine article “I Am Miss Saigon , and I Hate It.” The ...

By Michael Paller Growing up in Arkansas with Vietnamese refugee parents, Qui Nguyen loved hip-hop, action movies, and comic books. So when he began writing plays, he filled them with these passions: martial arts in Begets: Fall of a High School Ronin , superheroes in Men of Steel , and zombies in Alice in Slasherland . Many of these works were written for Nguyen’s Obie Award–winning “geek theater” company, Vampire Cowboys. We caught up with Nguyen in anticipation of his takeover of A.C.T.'s Strand Theater this upcoming week— Vietgone is playing in The Rembe and Begets  is playing in The Rueff—to talk to the man behind the work. This is Part Two. Artwork for A.C.T's Young Conservatory production of  Begets: Fall of a High School Ronin .   In a moment when the issue of refugees is more charged and divisive than it’s been for generations, what do you hope an audience might take away from Vietgone ? Politics can quickly dehumanize people, while the goal o...

By Taylor Steinbeck  Like many Americans,  Vietgone  playwright Qui Nguyen grew up watching Hollywood Vietnam War films such as Stanley Kubrick’s  Full Metal Jacket , but he struggled to identify with the Vietnamese characters because of how they were written. The characters often speak in an accented, pidgin English that is used either as a joke, or to exoticize them. In  Full Metal Jacket , American soldiers Private Joker and Private Rafterman are approached by a Da Nang sex worker, played by Anglo Chinese actress Papillon Soo Soo. She convinces the men to pay for her services by saying, “Me so horny. Me love you long time.” This line has since become engrained in American pop culture, referenced in television series including  Family Guy  and  South Park , and sampled in the rap hits 2 Live Crew’s “Me So Horny” and Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back.” The depiction of Vietnamese characters in this way is damaging because they are presented as al...

By Michael Paller Growing up in Arkansas with Vietnamese refugee parents, Qui Nguyen loved hip-hop, action movies, and comic books. So when he began writing plays, he filled them with these passions: martial arts in Begets: Fall of a High School Ronin , superheroes in Men of Steel , and zombies in Alice in Slasherland . Many of these works were written for Nguyen’s Obie Award–winning “geek theater” company, Vampire Cowboys. We caught up with Nguyen to chat about Vietgone , a play that combines his passions with the story of his parents. This is Part One. Vietgone playwright Qui Nguyen. Photo courtesy Qui Nguyen. We’ve read that you joined your high school drama club to meet cute girls, but since then you’ve written 12 plays and cofounded a theater company. What’s kept you in the theater besides the cute girls? [ Laughs ] Right now I’m working in TV and film but I still go back to theater because in theater I know my mission. In TV and film I’m more of a workhorse, but in t...