‘Poor Yella Rednecks’ Off Broadway Review: The Vietnam War’s End Was Only the Beginning
At its best, “Poor Yella Rednecks” creates the thrilling sensation of being dropped headfirst into a Roy Lichtenstein painting, especially those with the word “pow!” smeared across them. Qui Nguyen’s two-act comedy, with original songs by Shane Rettig, opened Wednesday at the Manhattan Theatre Club after its world premiere in 2019 at South Coast Rep. “Rednecks” picks up where Nguyen’s play “Vietgone” left off, with the Vietnamese family settling into an uneasy life in El Dorado, Arkansas, of all the places in America they could find themselves.
It’s a refreshing jolt to hear immigrants from Vietnam and hillbillies from Arkansas express themselves through rap, but that wonderful cultural mash-up permeates much of the production, directed in fits and starts by May Adrales. Tim Mackabee’s set and Jared Mezzocchi’s projections load the stage with colorful pop images.
Between scenes, the soundtrack blares with 1970s standards by Stevie Wonder and Sister Sledge, among others. “Poor Yella Rednecks” is really a musical, so the original recordings of songs like “We Are Family” can be a bit disconcerting even for a show that delights in mixing it up.
“Rednecks” is at its Lichtenstein best when Nguyen introduces his characters, and the Playwright (Jon Norman Schneider) asks his mother, Tong (Maureen Sebastian), how she came to fall in love and marry his father, Quang (Ben Levin). That Tong and Quang began their life in America, in the state of Arkansas, is a comic situation that Nguyen exploits to the hilt. Every actor in this ensemble is multitasking it with their hysterically funny send-ups of El Dorado’s blond natives, a reversal of Katharine Hepburn donning yellowface as an Asian character in “Dragon Seed.”
To digress a moment, I recently saw a “lesbian comedy” where the heterosexual sex depicted on stage was dreadful (a vibrator within reach of every female character), but the sex between the women sent them skyward. Likewise, when Tong takes a Caucasian boyfriend, Bobby (Paco Tolson in whiteface), it goes without saying that the sex has all the wonder of scrubbing the bathroom floor. So far so good, but making Bobby a Tupperware salesperson is where I have to draw the line.
When Tong and Quang’s son is a boy, his parents call him Little Man — but he is actually a large puppet (created by David Valentine) that’s manipulated and given splendid childlike voice by Schneider. Little Man’s grandmother Huong (Samantha Quan, who deserves a regular gig on “SNL”) is a feisty old gal who doesn’t have much time for assimilation, and she’s the one who teaches Little Man to be a kickass combatant. The many fight scenes between Little Man and his white classmates are repeated late in the play when his mother decides that she has also taken enough from the bigots where they live.
There’s no dramatic reason that there are so many fight scenes in “Rednecks” or that they go on so long – except they are brilliantly choreographed by William Carlos Angulo. In the end, they achieve a comic effect that is much more devastating than the long dialogue-filled book scenes (“Rednecks” really is a musical) that dominate the second act of this two-hour 20-minute show. Kitchen-sink issues quickly devolve into soap-opera suds, and Nguyen finds himself more preacher than playwright.
Like Nguyen’s writing, Rettig’s songs are most effective when they’re being ironic or the characters singing them are pissed off. When Rettig tries to be heartfelt, especially in Quang’s lament for being a bad but very-good-in-bed husband, the effect is downright maudlin. Also, to return to my Tupperware roots, I have to point out that “tone” does not really rhyme with “home.”
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