Vietgone opens with a man walking onstage. He looks out into the crowd and says, “Hi, I’m playwright Qui Nguyen. I’m here to introduce you to my play Vietgone.” This is not a pre-show talk. And this is not the real Qui Nguyen; it’s the character of the playwright, who is setting the rules of engagement for the play—a love story about how his Vietnamese parents met after the Vietnam War. 

In Vietgone, there is no Vietnamese language, no foreign accents, no historically accurate idioms. Instead, Tong, Nguyen’s mother, speaks a lingo that is distinctly modern—and definitely not PG rated. “It’s so f***ing nice to f***ing meet all you f***ing people,” is her first line in the play. Quang, Nguyen’s father, greets the audiences with “S’up, b****es.” This is not your mother’s Vietnam War play.

Speaking over Thai food in New York City, Nguyen is self-effacing yet precise about why he is choosing to use such vulgar language for the characters who are supposed to be his parents. 

“I want [the audience] to know that I’m a dirty-mouthed little juvenile,” he says with a laugh. That sentiment represents only a small sliver of why he chooses to write in that particular fashion. The playwright grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood in El Dorado, Arkansas. His parents owned a diner that his mother ran. His father, Quang, who had been a fighter pilot in South Vietnam during the war, worked in a cable-making factory.

Nguyen didn’t learn to speak English until kindergarten. “My influences tend to be extremely blue collar, and also from the pop culture that I was taking in, because it was my avenue in which I learned English,” he explains, “I obviously cuss a lot, I drop a lot of F-bombs. And in my plays, I definitely have it because this is how I think people talk.” 

Nguyen’s influences span different mediums, from Blaxploitation films such as Foxy Brown to Bruce Lee’s kung-fu films to comic books to Quentin Tarantino to Jay Z. In Vietgone, he takes all of those inspirations and stirs them into a historical drama that spans from the last days of the war in Saigon to a postwar refugee camp in Arkansas. The facts are all accurate, according to Nguyen; it’s just the language and style that might be disarming. And while it may be tough for some audiences to see a familiar topic done so nontraditionally, and a play to start with so much foul language, Nguyen notes that his parents’ love story eventually wins them over. “At my South Coast Rep presentation [at the 2015 Pacific Playwrights Festival], I sat in front of a wall of older, more conservative folks who said ‘oh my’ to every F-bomb that was said—for two straight minutes. However, by scene three they were crying.” 

Vietnamese characters are the heroes

Yet there is a method to all of the seeming madness. A Qui Nguyen play is not just irreverent for the sake of spectacle. It is a direct reaction to the plays and films about Vietnam that Nguyen was exposed to growing up.

“The Vietnamese characters were never the main characters; it was always some other white person coming in to save all the Vietnamese people,” Nguyen recalls. “It always felt really alienating. I’m always aware that when I’m writing stuff like this that I’m going to take that [feeling of alienation] away. These are the heroes of the play. So when they’re speaking, they just sound normal and eloquent and their ideas are coming quick and they’re sounding as cool as they can possibly sound.” 

This modern, hip dialogue is one that Nguyen has honed over his 15 years as the co-founder and co-artistic director of Vampire Cowboys, the New York City-based company that specializes in geek theatre (i.e., works that features superheroes, outrageous fight sequences and copious amounts of cursing. See related story on p. 14.). His dialogue has become so stylized, so distinctive, that Maureen Sebastian—who has acted in Nguyen’s plays numerous times before, and who played Tong in the world premiere of Vietgone at South Coast Repertory—has dubbed his mix of rapid-style speech patterns and contemporary lingo “Quiyanese.”

“I’m definitely vulgar without being angry,” says Nguyen. “[My characters are] bluecollar speakers, and they’re saying [f***] with a lot of affection. And I definitely use a lot of alliteration. You can just enjoy the fact that I’m playing with some words out there, that if something sounds cool, you can let it sound cool, that the character sounds cool.” 

A dose of hip-hop

It is Quiyanese, not Vietnamese, that audiences can expect to hear when they sit down for Vietgone. What else can they expect? Beats. The play features a number of rap songs, with lyrics by Nguyen and music by Shane Rettig. It’s not a musical, but the characters do bust rhymes when they become emotional. When Quang encounters a hippie who apologizes for America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, he delivers an impassioned ballad with the following refrain: “You lost a brotha / I lost my family / You lost a brotha / I lost my whole country.”

Besides comics and action movies, hip-hop is another one of Nguyen’s passions. This is not the first time that the characters in his plays have rapped (previous examples include The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G and the musical Krunk Fu Battle Battle).

Growing up in El Dorado in a predominantly African-American neighborhood, freestyle (i.e., lyrics improvised on the spot) rap battles were a pastime for Nguyen and his friends. “We would battle at the bus stop. And they were usually insult battles, basically ‘yo momma’ battles, except that they would rhyme. And I was terrible at them. I’d write down my rhymes before I showed up at the bus stop, which was totally cheating,” Nguyen recalls. 

For Nguyen, putting rap in Vietgone isn’t intended as cultural appropriation or pure irreverence. Instead, it’s a way of conveying the environment that Nguyen grew up in and his preferred style of expression. Which is why when it came time to write  the songs for Vietgone, Nguyen was determined to up his freestyling game. Knowing that writing lyrics down on paper made for more staid compositions, Nguyen instead turned to YouTube, where various deejays provide free beats for aspiring rappers to practice their rhymes.  “I freestyled it, recorded it and then transcribed it out,” he explains. “And of course, I freestyled more than what I wrote down. I probably wrote 20 songs worth of freestyle just to get to those lyrics [in the play].” 

Enlivening the past

Hip-hop, urban lingo, historical subject. That atypical combination may remind viewers of a show that’s currently on Broadway: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s foundingfather musical epic Hamilton, which features historical figures such as Alexander Hamilton and George Washington rapping and high-fiving each other. Nguyen has never met Miranda but he did see Hamilton during its tryout run at The Public Theater and loved it. Though both theatrical works are not 100 percent accurate period pieces, they aim to convey the energy of the time period in a way that is relatable to a modern audience, whether it’s the excitement at the birth of a nation, or the profound loss of life and home during war. “How hard it was to be broken away from your family,” explains Nguyen, “to be taken away from your country, to lose all those things, to be in a country that you don’t understand. . . . It was more important [to me] that the spirit of it was there, that you got the emotional truth of it versus, ‘is that really what that refugee camp looked like?’ ” 

Which is why, he’s careful to point out, audiences coming in expecting to hear lilting Vietnamese-language poetry, or wanting a melodramatic historical romance on par with Miss Saigon, or a cultural education similar to OSF’s Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land will be disappointed. Instead, Nguyen is aiming to tell a story that is both Vietnamese and American. And audiences will know that from the first line in the play.

“There’s nothing traditional about this,” Nguyen says, with a mix of forcefulness and tongue-in-cheek. “This is as modern as Hamilton. It is as modern as Avenue Q, as Spamalot, as The Book of Mormon. It’s not an education in that sense. But you will learn about my parents, about 1975 people.”