To say “Poor Yella Rednecks” is a love story about Vietnamese refugees in rural Arkansas in 1981 only gives you a fraction of what the play actually is.
Opening this week at American Conservatory Theater’s Strand Theater, it’s a wild comedy filled with rapping, puppetry and crazy fight sequences.
That is to say it’s a Qui Nguyen play.
“We always joke that every Qui play needs a set of nunchucks and a katana sword,” says director Jaime Castañeda.
Nguyen made a name for himself with wild geek-theater comedies such as “She Kills Monsters,” “Alice in Slasherland” and “Fight Girl Battle World” with his theater company Vampire Cowboys. In the last couple years he’s become more widely known as the screenwriter of Disney movies “Raya and the Last Dragon” and “Strange World.”
Part two of a trilogy about how his parents met and built a life in the American South, “Poor Yella Rednecks” is a sequel to his hit play “Vietgone,” which played ACT’s Strand in 2018.
“When I think about what made me want to be a writer, the goal, even when I was very, very small, was to tell my family’s story,” Nguyen says. “Because I remember being young and never feeling like I ever saw my story onscreen or onstage or told ever. I wanted to tell their stories so there would always be a story like this out there for a kid like me to be able to see it and hear it. And then the most basic thing was to give something to my kids.”
Castañeda directed “Vietgone” for ACT and now returns for the sequel.
“I’m first-generation Texan,” Castañeda says. “My folks are from Mexico, and I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s. Qui and I are around the same age. We bumped into language, we bumped into assimilation, we bumped into the systems that also bumped against us. And we also grew up with some of the same pop culture references that were specific to that era. Also, we’re both kind of hip-hop nerds. We’re both nerds in general, and we like the mashup of genre and theater.”
Nguyen was writing “Poor Yella Rednecks” when “Vietgone” was at ACT, and now he’s in the middle of writing the third play.
“When I started, I thought of it as a five-play saga,” Nguyen says. “Basically the first play was my parents getting together. Second play was them opening this diner that kind of solidified them as a members of their community. Third play was the arrival of my brother, or my cousin who we adopted as my brother because of things that happened. And the fourth play and fifth play dealt with elements that I think at this point I’ve decided not to write about: the death of my grandma and my parents in their elder years. I felt like both of those have logical conclusions that I don’t necessarily want to delve into emotionally right now. So it became a trilogy.”
“Poor Yella Rednecks” premiered in 2019 at South Coast Rep in Costa Mesa in a co-world premiere with Manhattan Theatre Club, which was to produce it off-Broadway in May 2020, followed by ACT that June and OSF that July. The pandemic derailed those plans, so now the New York premiere is slated for this fall, making ACT the play’s second production.
“When the play was first written, ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ had just dropped, and it had become a big thing,” Nguyen recalls. “It was interesting because without knowing that that was going to exist, I had written ‘Poor Yella Rednecks,’ which almost felt like the opposite of ‘Crazy Rich Asians,’ right down to our titles.”
Those few intervening years have made a difference in how Nguyen sees the play.
“In the last monologue, the mom character asks me why I wrote this play,” he says. “And I literally go, ‘I writ this so my kids could witness a world in which they get to be the protagonist.’ When I wrote that, when I looked up at the screen there wasn’t a lot of representation for them. And now when I hear those lyrics, not only have there been things like ‘Shang-Chi’ and ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ and ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once,’ but I’ve also added onto that conversation with ‘Raya and the Last Dragon.’ Prophetically, I wrote that before I got in the business of changing things. My wife listened to it and was like, ‘Did you know you were going to do that? This sounds like you wrote this in hindsight.’ Apparently 40-year-old Qui knew more about what 45-year-old Qui was going to be than I realized.”
Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.
‘POOR YELLA REDNECKS’
By Qui Nguyen, presented by American Conservatory Theater
When: In previews through April 11, main run is April 12-May 7
Where: ACT’s Strand Theater, 1127 Market St., San Francisco
Tickets: $25-$60; 415-749-2228, www.act-sf.org
𝗖𝗿𝗲𝗱𝗶𝘁𝘀, 𝗖𝗼𝗽𝘆𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 & 𝗖𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘁𝗲𝘀𝘆: www.mercurynews.com
𝗙𝗼𝗿 𝗮𝗻𝘆 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝗿𝗲𝗴𝗮𝗿𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗗𝗠𝗖𝗔,
𝗣𝗹𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝘀𝗲𝗻𝗱 𝘂𝘀 𝗮𝗻 𝗲𝗺𝗮𝗶𝗹 𝗮𝘁 dmca@enspirers.com
