INTERVIEW: Maureen Sebastian on entering the world of ‘Poor Yella Rednecks’
Photo: Poor Yella Rednecks stars Maureen Sebastian and Ben Levin. Photo courtesy of Jeremy Daniel / Provided by BBB with permission.
One of the most talked about theater productions in New York City is Poor Yella Rednecks at Manhattan Theatre Club. Playing at the company’s City Center stage, the new show from Qui Nguyen tells the story of a Vietnamese family trying to set up their lives in Arkansas. They struggle with finding love and surviving difficult economic realities, all while their past hovers above them, reminding them of family and friends back in Vietnam. There’s a lot of heartbreak and drama in the piece, but much of the plot is firmly in the comedic genre. Nguyen has an uncanny ability to craft characters who are hilarious and touching, and he likes to play with form as much as he does substance. Sometimes the characters break into a rap song to emote their feelings; other times it’s a kung fu fight. Oh, yeah, one pivotal character is represented as a puppet, and there’s animation … and Stan Lee … and a montage sequence.
The world of Poor Yella Rednecks, which is directed by May Adrales, is actually shared by Nguyen’s other hit play, Vietgone, and many of the actors at MTC appeared in that previous show as well. For example, Maureen Sebastian has performed in several of Nguyen’s works over the years. Audiences know her from MTC’s The Best We Could: A Family Tragedy, Arabian Nights and Vietgone, among many other shows. On TV, she has appeared in everything from Love Life to American Gothic to Revolution.
“Qui and I have known each other basically since I first moved to New York in 2005,” Sebastian said in a recent phone interview. “I had just graduated from college, and he was one of the first playwrights that I had auditioned for. It was a play at Ma-Yi Theater Company called Trial by Water, and I didn’t actually get that part. But he brought me into his theater company, Vampire Cowboys, and it was one of the first plays I did in New York, Living Dead in Denmark. And it was a mashup of like Hamlet and a zombie apocalypse, and he cast me in that. And we’ve had a long-standing artistic collaboration since then, so it’s almost 20 years we’ve been working together.”
In Poor Yella Rednecks, Sebastian plays the pivotal part of Tong, who lives in Arkansas with her family, but times are tough. Jobs don’t pay that much money, but she has a dream of buying the local restaurant where she works, and setting up personal and professional roots in the area.
“He brought me into the world of Vietgone and Poor Yella Rednecks with the first production of Vietgone at South Coast Repertory, which was a co-pro with Manhattan Theatre Club,” Sebastian said. “I think Qui interestingly writes specifically for the people that he knows and has worked with for a long time, so Tong reminded me of a lot of characters that I had known in his writing for a long time. These kind of boldly, audacious female protagonists that do what they want despite what the world around them is telling them they should be doing, sometimes to their detriment, but often to their success and their overall journey. And so that for me was something that I personally connected to, and then of course just knowing the story of his family as Vietnamese refugees and my family’s story coming from the Philippines. That immigrant story resonated really deeply with me, so I thought I could bring a lot of that to life when I first encountered her.”
Sebastian said that when she first reads a script by Nguyen, there’s often an exaggerated description on the page, but that goes with the territory of entering this theatrical world.
“He writes insane things on the page,” she said with a laugh. “He’ll write, ‘The craziest fight sequence ever put on a world stage production,’ or he’ll say, ‘A puppet-type montage that is akin to the best montages you’ve ever seen in your life.’ You’re just like, what does this even mean? So often Qui in general chooses people to work with that he’s worked with for a long time and understands his overall aesthetic and vision, so it’s a lot of trial and error, especially for the puppet montage. They worked on that endlessly and added things and took things away and put things back in and then added new things. It was evolving basically until we got into the theater through tech, and it even changed then when light and sounds came into play. It’s an ever-evolving process and something that I think takes a really immense collaborative effort between Qui and the director, May, and all of the actors.”
Sebastian not only acts in the play but also raps several songs. Her rhyming abilities are a central part of the 2-hour-15-minute show; the tunes allow Tong to share her thoughts and feelings about the joy and heartbreak being experienced in this world.
“I feel like it definitely leans into the musical theater trope of the feeling is so big that it needs to go into another realm, and that obviously is singing and rapping,” Sebastian said. “[Qui] tries it, and he sees if it works. And if it does, then it stays in the play, and if it doesn’t, then we scrap it, and we figure something else out. … It’s fun and it’s interesting and it’s new, and it also elevates what’s happening within that character themselves.”
In order to have this stage family feel authentic and believable, the actors need to form a family themselves. This is aided by the fact that many of them have worked together on Nguyen’s plays before. This is a multi-year commitment, in some respects.
“So there’s that element of we know each other’s work so well, we know each other so well, we know this world so well, and we can kind of slip into it together, and that creates a family in and of itself,” Sebastian said. “We just feel that comfortable with one another, and I trust them with my life on stage. I would do anything for them and vice versa.”
Having such an unconventional show be produced by Manhattan Theatre Club at a storied venue in Midtown Manhattan is important and speaks to the need to have diverse voices — be them playwrights, directors or actors — represented and amplified on the stages of New York City. This is important to Sebastian as well.
“The fact that this play is happening at Manhattan Theatre Club, I mean it does not go unnoticed,” she said. “A play like this, too, is not just a play about people of color, but it’s also wildly inventive and so different from a well-crafted play. It’s not a living-room drama. It has puppets. It has kung fu. It has training montages. It has rapping. What I find so inspiring is looking out into the audience when we do our curtain call every night and seeing … so many different types of people in a theater together watching a show that they all feel super-connected to and super-moved by is really heartening. It means people are looking for generative stories that are going to bring us all together.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Poor Yella Rednecks, starring Maureen Sebastian, continues through Dec. 3 at New York City Center. The Manhattan Theatre Club production is written by Qui Nguyen and directed by May Adrales. Click here for more information and tickets.
