You could say Students for a Democratic Society was all about inclusion. In 1969, with the Weather Underground in control and the Vietnam war in full swing, it supported an anti-capitalist revolution, carried out by colonized and oppressed people everywhere in alliance with what we’d now call woke Western white folks. (Violent woke Western white folks, as it happened: “Bring the war home” was an invitation to tear up “Pig City” [i.e., Chicago] in response to the previous year’s Democratic convention.) Our theater community’s current effort to bring inclusion to the arts by producing the work of writers of color, cast with actors of color—a peaceful, more doable revolution—owes a little something to SDS.
The dad-to-be is Quang (Matthew C. Yee), a former captain in the South Vietnamese Air Force, who got separated from his wife and children during the April 1975 evacuation that preceded the communist takeover of the capital, and who has hatched a quixotic plan to reunite with them (assuming they’re alive) by motorcycling to California from his present residence—the refugee camp at Fort Chaffee in Arkansas—then hopping over to Guam and catching a plane back home. The mom is Tong (Aurora Adachi-Winter), a tough-minded, randy 30-year-old (“If you don’t have children soon,” a suitor tells her, “your ovaries will dry up”), feeling guilty about the brother she left behind but anxious to start over “now that Saigon’s gone.” The two meet very, very cute at the camp, finding it convenient to pair up for sex before true love and a new life take hold.
Through 9/23: Wed-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 and 6 PM, Tue 7:30 PM, Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Ct., Glencoe, 847-242-6000, writerstheatre.org, $35-$80.
