The Good Guys: An American Tragedy (review)

The Good Guys: An American Tragedy. Written and directed by Michael Edo Keane and Miko Lee. Produced and presented at the Theater of Yugen, San Francisco.

Years before the highly publicized twenty-five year commemoration of the Fall of Saigon, artistic team Michael Edo Keane and Miko Lee have been crafting a script about Vietnamese American youth. In April 2000, The Good Guys, An American Tragedy premiered at the Theater of Yugen in San Francisco. ¹

The three-act play is based on the April 4, 1991 headline incident involving three Vietnamese American brothers and their friend who stormed into the Good Guys electronic store in Sacramento and held forty-one hostages at gunpoint. The eight-hour siege ended in the deaths of three hostages and three of the four culprits. Long Nguyen, the lone surviving gunman is currently serving forty-nine consecutive life terms in Corcoran State Prison.

This plot centers on the family life of the Nguyen brothers, who struggle to fit into American society while trying to appease their demanding father, a former ARVN ² soldier. Feeling uprooted and alienated, the brothers look to popular Asian images (such as Hong Kong gangsters) for validation and vindication.

In this retelling, Lee and Keane deployed Asian performance techniques, multi-media, poetic verse, and police transcripts from the actual event. Techniques range from Noh theater, Butoh movements, martial arts, black-clad kurogo (stage hands), Indonesian shadow puppets, and Vietnamese cai luong. It also drew from the highly regarded literary work, The Tale of Kieu, ³ a Vietnamese epic narrative poem.

This production marks Keane and Lee's interest in developing a unique pan-Asian American performance aesthetic. For example, the shadow puppets and the kurogos appear in juxtaposition with the heavy technical soundscape and video installation. This fragmented arrangement attempts to show the contradictions between the world sought by the Nguyen family and the society for which they actually entered.

The playwrights also use the poetic verse to show the emotional world of the Nguyen family. Working against the stereotypical depiction of refugees, the poetic verse (spoken within their world) illustrates their complicated interpretation of their experiences, their intricate relationships and their intense response to what is happening around them. The separation between their inside world and outside world is emphasized through the multiple "languages." Despite some moments of strain, the actors delivered the poetry, showing the balance and negotiation sought by the fictional, and factual, characters. In addition, the incorporation of texts from the hostage takeover works well to illustrate the family's multiple sites of fragmentation.

The Good Guys: An American Tragedy explores themes familiar in Asian American narratives: generational conflict, struggle to settle in the American landscape, imaginary homeland, rejecting mainstream stereotypes of Asian Americans. It also grapples with some fresh themes in Vietnamese American narratives of resettlement and trauma. For example, this play bravely engages with issues of Catholicism and anti-communism in the Vietnamese American community, topics that are often sites of tension in the community. In addition, it confronts issues of domestic violence (physical and verbal), shame, suffering, and fear as manifested in family/home structure. Although for the most part, this play is centered on the transformation of the male characters, the playwrights present strong and sympathetic female characters. Though it remains an unexplored sub-plot, one of the most intense moments of the play is when Buom, the oldest sister in the Nguyen family, narrates her rape while at sea.

Rarely in Vietnamese American literature, let alone theater, are these themes brought out in such a direct manner. The plight of refugee/immigrant Vietnamese youth in the United States often go unrecognized--buried under their parents' assimilation issues or stories of valedictorians overcoming all hardships to attain the American dream. Hence, even though the Good Guys incident took place nearly a decade ago, the youth traumas brought about in the play still resonates...