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Daily Planet Correspondent 

SAN FRANCISCO – On April 4, 1991, three Vietnamese-American brothers stormed into a Good Guys electronics store in Sacramento, held 41 people hostage at gunpoint, and demanded a helicopter to take them back to Southeast Asia to fight the Viet Cong. 

During the eight-hour siege that followed, two of the brothers were killed. The surviving brother is currently serving 49 consecutive life terms in Corcoran State Prison. 

This tragic and complex event is the basis for “The Good Guys: An American Tragedy,” a multi-media play that opened its world premiere Thursday in San Francisco presented by Theater of Yugen, a performance group that stages work dealing with the Pan Asian diaspora. 

“Good Guys” is an ambitious project. It tries, with only partial success, to tell the complex and comprehensive story of the immigrant Sacramento Nguyen family.  

The play attunes itself to the dissonances of a family caught among several cultures - South Vietnamese, communist Vietnamese, American and Roman Catholic, to name a few. 

At one point in “Good Guys,” family patriarch Ba (Randall Nakano), an 18-year veteran of the South Vietnamese army, says of his life moving from culture to culture, that he feels he’s lived over and over as a child. 

The Nguyen family escaped Vietnam for the United States as refugee boat people in the 1970s, and suffered many abuses and privations. 

Once in America, the family’s three young boys, outcasts at school, grew quickly into cultural misfits and began downward social spirals. 

Eldest son Ly (Michael Cheng) is schizophrenic and delusional, with a growing psychosis, lost in a cultural fantasy world. Trouble-making youngest son Khang (Dong Nguyen) is locked in an oedipal battle with his disapproving, abusive father. 

Written by Yugen artistic directors Michael Edo Keane and Miko Lee, who also directed and choreographed the play, the script of “Good Guys” uses a cinematic story structure with many short scenes to tell its story. 

It contains a mix of reality, memory and fantasy that tries to reflect the lives of a culturally displaced family. 

But “Good Guys” doesn’t have a clear central character or a clear unifying story line. It waffles here and there, often repeating information or the characters’ emotional states and situations a second, third, or fourth time. 

It also has the disappointing knack of telegraphing what’s to come, depriving the play of suspense, so this complex and fascinating story comes off as flat and predictable. 

With three long acts, the show is way too long, running more than three hours opening night, including two intermissions. The length could be cut in half. Flashbacks about the family’s boat arrival, for example, in the second half of the play, were old news by then and contributed little to the evening. 

The store shoot-out at the end, chopped up by flashbacks, was anti-climactic.  

Interactions among the brothers and the hostages were inexplicably omitted from the story. Interactions among brothers, hostages and police negotiators have the potential to be strong dramatic material. 

In one rather self-indulgent bit of posturing, writer/director Keane plays a pedantic Sacramento Vietnamese gangster and Nguyen family friend who for some inexplicable reason has a pronounced Hollywood theatrical accent that seems completely wrong for the character. 

“Good Guys” is a complicated technical show. It uses traditional theater plus audio tracks, live and taped video, shadow play performed against a backlit screen, radio commercials, political speeches by Reagan and Bush, snippets from Mr. Rogers’s television show, and Brecht-like aphorisms projected on a screen, serving as a gloss on the action. 

On opening night, there were many technical problems. Video and audio transmissions kicked in and out unexpectedly. 

The acoustics in Theater Artaud, where the play is being staged, are tough. Not infrequently the actors spoke towards the side or rear of the stage, and were hard to hear. Offstage voices were also often hard to understand in the cavernous, echo-prone space. 

Basically, the opening night show felt under-rehearsed, like the audience was watching a combination of technical and dress rehearsals. 

Which is too bad, because the 1991 Sacramento event is a significant and meaningful one from which we all have the potential to learn valuable things about America’s important history of inclusion, and the complexities of our melting pot culture. 

“The Good Guys, An American Tragedy,” presented by Theater of Yugen, plays Thursday through Sunday, through April 22, at Theater Artaud, 450 Florida St., San Francisco. For information and reservations, call 415-621-7797.