Funny Haha or Funny Living Nightmare

Thursday night, I was at the Next Stage Festival at The Factory Theatre. Promising Fringe shows from the summer are remounted in a more professional setting to appeal to a wider audience. I was here to see Franco Nguyen's one-man show Good Morning Viet Mom.

Through the lens of comedy (Nguyen is a stand-up comic), some home videos from a few trips back to Asia, and personal anecdotes, he detailed his love-hate relationship with his mom and dad, racism, and poverty. It wasn't quite as enjoyable as I thought. This might sound callous, but the hard-scrabble life of a refugee or immigrant has been extensively chronicled in fact and fiction, and with more eloquence. So it would take something more to shed new light on the subject.

And Nguyen wasn't that person. He had an engaging personality and his comedy routines came across best, often soliciting big laughs. But his limited acting made the serious scenes amateurish. So I wasn't convinced enough to buy the hoped-for emotional payoff. Which is a weird phrase to use for autobiographical material. The length of the time, almost 50 years from his mom's teen-age years, was also too long. So much stuff was presented, it paradoxically made the play felt thin because it was all short fragments. The audience wasn't given the time to sit and absorb a situation.

This could be a good show if Nguyen could get an editor and humbly step away to let a professional tell his story.