In “The World is Not Silent,” a new play up at Northern Stage, the character Don is obsessed with taking photos of the night sky outside his family home in Nebraska.
Known as astrophotography, it’s a craft that requires much patience and technical skill, but when done correctly results in breathtaking images of celestial bodies and glimmering stars, like a magic key opening doors to new worlds.
The pursuit of new forms of connection, of bridging the gap that exists when we can’t understand each other, is crucial to Don and to the beating heart of “The World is Not Silent,” a comedic, heartfelt production with earnest performances from its three actors.
A somewhat awkward, introverted man who immigrated to the U.S. from Saigon with his family when he was young, Don feels alienated from his father and Vietnamese community because he struggles to speak the language.
On top of that, his father is losing his hearing, making it even harder for the two of them to communicate. They butt heads often, never really connecting the way Don did with his mom, who is no longer around.
When the play opens, it’s Thanksgiving, and Dau, Don’s father, played by Peter Trinh, is exasperated with his son for not procuring his favorite dish: honey ham.
Trinh’s Dau is all jokes and deflection; he seems allergic to intimacy, though we eventually learn he has his reasons for wearing his armor so tightly.
Don’s under the impression that they’ve both been learning American Sign Language so that they can communicate after Dau loses his hearing, but at dinner he discovers that the whole time his father had been picking up Vietnamese Sign Language, and the two are no closer to connecting.
One more surprise is that Dau has invited a guest: Linh, a family friend from Vietnam who he’s bent on fixing Don up with.
If Don (Paul Yen) is quiet and a bit unsure, Mai Lê’s Linh is bubbly and enthusiastic, an eager traveler, and the glue between father and son.
She arrives like a whirlwind, honey ham in hand, with plans to stay for a year and teach VSL to the Vietnamese community.
Lê’s performance, a marriage of jubilance and the occasional sarcastic remark, was a pleasure to watch. She’s played Linh before, in the play’s premier run at Alley Theatre in Houston. That much was clear from the way she imbued her character with such texture and depth.
She agrees to teach Don VSL so he can communicate with his dad, and through that project the two form an unlikely friendship, tinged with some flirtatious undertones.
Linh’s an empathetic ear, and it’s through Don’s conversations with her that we learn how unmoored he feels in his own identity as an immigrant.
He thought he was doing right by his dad by learning English and assimilating into his new home, only to discover that his efforts to fit in had driven a wedge between him, his dad and his Vietnamese heritage.
The play may be set in Nebraska, but it easily could have taken place in the Upper Valley, where the population is overwhelmingly white, forcing people of color to reckon with which parts of their identity they need to mute in order to fit in.
Don isn’t wholly likeable as a character. His angst makes him a bit self-centered, not unlike a more outwardly anxious version of his dad, and he often neglects to offer Linh the same listening ear that she does him.
But I kind of preferred a flawed Don to a virtuous version. After all, there’s no reason why a character, or a person, needs to be likeable in order to deserve our curiosity or compassion.
Written by Don X. Nguyen, the play is partly autobiographical. Like his character, Nguyen fled Saigon with his family at a young age and spent his childhood in Nebraska.
And like Don, Nguyen also has a passion for astrophotography, which he documents on his blog, The Interstellar Feller.
He’s penned nine full-length plays, his website says, including “Sound,” a drama set on Martha’s Vineyard that incorporates American Sign Language alongside spoken English.
“The World is Not Silent” made its world premiere in 2024. It’s still a fledgling work, which perhaps explains some snags in the writing and in the shape of the narrative.
For instance, there were moments at Thursday’s performance when the play seemed to do some of the intellectual legwork on the audience’s behalf, instead of trusting us to make sense of the story on our own, such as when Don wondered whether VSL could serve as his common language with his dad, not unlike how he and his mom were able to understand each other without speaking. I’m not sure he had to say all that for us to pick up on the parallel.
And I wish we could have seen more of Dau observing his son’s efforts to learn VSL. Save for the opening scenes, and quiet moments when he’s by himself and the armor falls away, we don’t see much of him until the end of the show.
It’s hard to believe that Don’s relationship with him could really change when we haven’t been privy to watching it happen, at least until the end.
But in spite of the play’s weaker points, the experience of watching Thursday’s performance was a powerful one. The characters use a mixture of Vietnamese, English and VSL, and simply having those three languages front and center in a theater in rural Vermont felt like an important moment, especially at a time when people of color and immigrants are being treated with such hostility in our country.
As people trickled into the theater before the lights went down, I watched an Asian child, maybe 5 or 6 years-old, with hearing aids, follow his parents down the aisles.
I wondered what he thought of the show; what it felt like to have some version of his experience represented on stage. I wondered what his parents thought of it.
There’s a part of me that wonders if plays such as “The World is Not Silent” don’t serve as some sort of wish fulfillment for white audiences. We become passive viewers, while the characters wrestle with the complexities of living in a country where parts of their culture and language are not wholly accessible.
But watching Thursday’s performance, I got the sense that the play was first and foremost for the people most reflected in it.
Northern Stage’s production of “The World is Not Silent” is up through Feb. 22 in White River Junction. For tickets ($37-$80; $28 for youth and students) go to northernstage.org or call 802-296-7000.