“Vietgone,” opening Friday at the Alley Theatre, is a play about Asian people — actually about Asian people.

It’s not a play about Asian side characters, about white people learning about Asia or about how good a white hero — and a white audience — is when they learn not to be racist against a person of color. It’s nothing like “The King and I” or “Miss Saigon.”

Or, as director Desdemona Chiang puts it, “This is a story about Asian people who are the heroes of their story, and not sidekicks and decorations to a white hero.”

As the conversation around EDI (equity, diversity and inclusion) continues to evolve and becomes more nuanced within the American theater, plays are being produced that challenge audiences to think in more progressive ways about the stories and existences of people of color.

“Vietgone” is one such play. Written by Qui Nguyen, an American playwright and screenwriter for Marvel Studios, the play tells the real-life story of how Nguyen’s parents met. Nguyen’s father, forced to leave his home country of Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975, lives in a refugee camp in Arkansas, where he meets another refugee, with whom he falls in love.

The story has the underpinnings of a serious drama, but it’s told in an exuberant, heavily stylized manner that resembles a mash-up between a movie rom-com and a hip-hop music video. Since its premiere in 2015, it has been produced in theaters across the nation.

“Vietgone” When: Friday through Nov. 3 Where: The Alley Theatre, 615 Texas Details: $49-$61; alleytheatre.org

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But the play’s existence, Chiang says, means a lot more than an audience watching a cross-continental love story. That an Asian-centered play is being produced in major theaters in the U.S. says something about where we are as a culture, or at least where we’re beginning to shift.

“Vietgone” being at the Alley, in other words, is representative of a cultural shift in both theater and in the larger world, one in which people of color are finding more opportunities to tell stories about themselves, on their terms.

Chiang, a Taiwanese-born and American-raised theater director, says, “because I was born oversees and grew up in Southern California in a primarily immigrant community, I grew up very centered in my Asian-ness. I spoke Chinese at home and went to a very multicultural school. I never felt othered until I started working in the theater.”

Discovering Qui Nguyen

When Chiang started auditioning for parts as an actor, she wasn’t aware that the theater world of 20 years ago was rife with traditions and biases that made it nearly impossible for a nonwhite actor to find equitable opportunity. “I wasn’t aware then of implicit bias. I was functioning in this meritocratic mode of thought. I thought, ‘Oh, I must not be good enough.’”

So she decided to become a director. “I’ll do the picking instead of being the one being picked,” she says. Alongside actor Richard Nguyen Sloniker, she founded Azeotrope, a Seattle-based theater company specializing in telling the stories of marginalized people.

Chiang long knew of Nguyen’s work, which earlier in his career focused on rambunctious genre-mashups such as the “Vampire Cowboy Trilogy.” But she never thought his work was something regional theaters would be interested in. Then “Vietgone” arrived.

At first, Chiang was surprised.

“Qui Nguyen is getting a regional theater premier? Who wants to do a POC-centered horror-slasher play? That’s not their bag. That’s not, ‘Let’s talk about dysfunctional white people,’” Chiang says.

“I saw it, and it’s brilliant,” she continues. “It has all of his stylings. It’s deep, it’s political. It has all of the large ideas regional theater likes, and 10 years later, regional theater was ready for someone like him. They’re more accepting of these kinds of plays.”

‘Mozarella cheese sticks yee haw’

The first scene of “Vietgone” involves a character named The Playwright explaining to the audience that all the Vietnamese spoken in the story is performed in American English, and all the English in the story — which would have been incomprehensible for the play’s Vietnamese protagonists — comes out as gibberish.

“The Americans say things like ‘mozzarella cheese sticks, yee haw yee haw.’ It’s the reversal of ‘ching chong ping pong,’ everything ‘The Mikado’ did for us,” Chiang says. “It’s a call-out to a legacy of stereotyping Asian people.”

The fact that Vietnamese is translated into American English is also brilliant, she says.

“It’s defending his voice as a writer. His parents don’t speak like him, but in this play they do. Because that is his voice. His voice is, ‘Yo, what’s up, white people!’ It’s a way of giving them agency that’s recognizable to us.”

In other words, “Vietgone” uses the power of theater to center Asian people in the room. It’s an empowering feeling, Chiang says, one that she feels often in the rehearsal room as she works with her all-Asian cast.

“The play has been produced with enough frequency that we’re swapping trade secrets,” she says. “We’re sharing notes. ‘Oh, when they did it in Minneapolis, it was like this.’ When something becomes so widespread it becomes common knowledge, something that’s just part of the culture. It’s like talking about different versions of ‘Spider-Man.’ That’s where the big win is.”

wchen@chron.com

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