Qui Nguyen’s Poor Yella Rednecks has the exuberance and abundance of a big family-reunion bash — which is, in a sense, exactly what it is. The play-with-hip-hop-numbers, not quite a full musical, is the sequel to Nguyen’s 2016 comedy Vietgone (though that show isn’t required viewing; Rednecks catches you up), and it brings multiple collaborators from that show back together, from director May Adrales to several members of the design team and cast. Paco Tolson, who plays (as does almost everyone) a variety of parts, notes in his bio that he and Nguyen have been making stuff together for nearly two decades. That camaraderie is palpable on stage. Whatever its shortcomings, Poor Yella Rednecks effervesces goodwill. Its combination of unfeigned earnestness and irreverent, early-Marvel-era wit can’t help but bring to mind that moment — that other world — when Obama was still president and Hamilton was taking its shot on Broadway.
It’s not just vibes: Hamilton and the MCU are both actively present in the room. Nguyen — a Spider-Man enthusiast from a young age, this show makes clear — now writes for both Marvel and Disney; Tim Mackabee’s set and Jared Mezzocchi’s projections riff on comic-book panels and old BIF! BANG! POW! cartoons; and the play’s spunky, sincere bars don’t just invoke Lin-Manuel Miranda — they straight-up quote him. “Like the song says,†rap Nguyen’s characters, “‘immigrants: We get the job done!’â€
Such an explicit tip of the hat is a little jarring, but perhaps Nguyen weighed his options and thought it better to be upfront about something that’s fairly obvious anyway. Big, bright, and direct is Poor Yella Rednecks’ style, starting with the massive letters that spell out YELLA in three dimensions across the stage, each one rotating to reveal a modular set for a specific location and all serving as projection surfaces for the highly-caffeinated ’toons that accompany the story. That story picks up where Vietgone left off, with Nguyen’s parents, Tong (Maureen Sebastian) and Quang (Ben Levin), Vietnamese refugees who met in 1975 in a relocation camp in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, after escaping the fall of Saigon.
Well, actually, it starts with Nguyen’s onstage avatar, the Playwright (Jon Norman Schneider). In a present-day prologue, the Playwright welcomes us to the show, then passes off his storytelling duties to “the single greatest narrator of all time from any medium,†Stan Lee (Tolson, gruff and garrulous in the requisite aviators and one of many wigs). As Stan takes the reins, the Playwright can step inside the frame to have a scene with his mom. Some of the funniest and most moving moments in Poor Yella Rednecks hinge on the ability of certain actors, especially Sebastian, to age and de-age before our eyes. As in Vietgone, a big part of Nguyen’s project is to celebrate his parents as whole people — striving, flawed, potty-mouthed, even sexy. Sebastian begins the play hunched over, in a cardigan and glasses, tut-tutting her son’s desire to write a play about her life (“That a terrible idea … This is why you so poor … Only white people like to watch a playâ€). But she spends most of it in cute jeans and ringer tees as her younger self — a determined young woman five years into her marriage, trying to raise a kid on a diner waitress’s salary while making it through the day as an Asian immigrant in the deep south. (Between Valérie Thérèse Bart’s fun, quick-changing costumes here and the clothes on stage in Stereophonic, the ’70s and early ’80s are getting some really deserved love right now, and people’s butts look great.)
Vietgone was Tong and Quang’s meet-cute, as well as a road-trip play for Quang and his friend, Nhan (Jon Hoche played the role in 2016, and he reprises it here). Poor Yella Rednecks is the comedy that happens after marriage — the story that, as older Tong demands that it should, contains “true and hard†things, not just “romantic and funny.†Quang left another family behind in Vietnam. He also can’t hold down a job. Infidelity rears its head, as does money, in a way that feels honest in its ever-present anxiety: The “poor†in the show’s title is just as important as the “yella.†How many plays show a mother counting her change in Safeway to see if she can afford groceries? It’s a moment that’s all the stronger because it isn’t leaned on for pathos, and because it’s immediately followed up with a high-flying, Dolly Parton–underscored kung fu battle that “according to the real-life accounts of Tong Nguyen … is all completely true.â€
But perhaps the truest and hardest (and some of the funniest) stuff in Poor Yella Rednecks has to do with language. Schneider, with the help of a sweet, Henson-esque puppet designed by David Valentine, also plays “Little Man,†the Playwright/Nguyen as a 5-year-old boy. As the stress cracks start to appear in Tong and Quang’s marriage, Tong is, at the same time, facing the inevitable and bitter pressure to make sure that her son learns English. “He has no friends,†she tells her husband, “his teachers can’t talk to him, and he spends all day with my crazy-ass mother while I work my ass off.†That crazy-ass mother, Huong (a full-throttle Samantha Quan, who’s great fun in all her parts) speaks only Vietnamese, enjoys shotgunning beers and flirting with Quang’s friends, and frequently imparts motherly advice such as, when her daughter is estranged from Quang, broke, and half-heartedly seeing an old (white) boyfriend: “Look at you. You’re an Asian nine, he’s a non-Asian four at best. Fucking him is already a charity case, you might as well get some cash out of it too.â€
After the prologue, where older Tong sets the rules for her son’s play, language in Poor Yella Rednecks is delightfully, subversively flipped on its head. When characters speak fluent — and often amusingly filthy — English, it’s meant to convey that they’re speaking fluent Vietnamese. When they talk in broken English (the kind we tend to associate with ugly Asian stereotypes), they’re speaking Vietnamese, but badly — like Tong’s awkward wanna-be-boyfriend, Bobby (Tolson again), whom we hear as Tong hears him: “Sorry, me Vietnamese is rust bucket. Long time since using it.†And when people talk, or rather holler, in a bizarre mishmash of brand slogans, pop-culture references, and southern slang — “Catawampus! Kombucha! Woke!â€, “Fuck a duck, Starsky and Hutch!â€, “Yeehaw! Get’er done! Five-dollar foot-long!†— that’s actual English, or rather American. It’s one of older Tong’s rules: “I want all the white people to sound like the way I hear them.†With no need for subtitles, Nguyen creates a multilingual play, establishing point of view in a way that’s both funny and profound.
It’s a credit to the overall charm and vivacity of Poor Yella Rednecks that the “Yeehaw!†gambit works as well as it does. It also doesn’t overstay its welcome: Crucially, there aren’t that many white people in the play. It’s not about them. And, as broadly comic as the play’s rendering of American English is, Nguyen also knows language is more than a game. It can be a door and it can also be a wall. There’s real ache to it the first time we hear Little Man — who’s defended himself against some school bullies — blurt out a phrase in English to stop his mother and grandmother from fighting. “I will not Hulk Hogan the Honky Tonk Piggly Wigglies at Saved by the Bell†is ludicrous — we want to laugh at it, but we know it marks the beginning of a life-altering shift for this entire family. Later on, when Little Man, trying to work out the world around him, tells his grandmother, “You’re Vietnamese … And I’m a cheeseburger,†the effect is gutting. Nguyen has found a distinctive comic vocabulary for addressing the heartbreaking compromises of assimilation.
If the musical interludes that punctuate Poor Yella Rednecks can sometimes feel a little flat, a bit overlong and sentimental, it’s because the show’s conscious play with language is, elsewhere, so potent and precise. Nguyen’s dialogue aims for both comedy and nuance and often hits the mark, but his lyrics can float into a generalized place, both structurally and thematically:
Poor yella rednecks — we demand respect
Ain’t got alotta money but we’re still damn perfect
Have pride in us, son — listen to our reason
We’re climbing mountains while the rest of them are sleeping
For a titular, heart-of-the-show, bring-us-to-our-feet chorus, that quatrain doesn’t hold its weight. The rhymes could use more discipline, and the content feels like an empowering wash. Nguyen has spent the play showing us that none of these people is perfect, because they’re whole people — struggling, failing, loving, trying again. Poor Yella Rednecks most finds its strength when it keeps its complexity — its humor and profanity, its honesty and generosity around human beings’ many fuck-ups — along with its earnestness. Notwithstanding those big letters up on the stage, the show doesn’t need to spell it out for us: It’s already written a love letter.
Poor Yella Rednecks is at Manhattan Theatre Club at New York City Center.