Vi Tran wears so many creative hats that it’s sometimes hard to know what to call him. As an actor he has demonstrated an exceptionally wide range: from the serious (Miss Saigon at the Paramount Theatre and Western Playhouse, Vietgone, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, and The Oldest Boy at the Unicorn Theatre) to the comedic (Finding Nemo at The Coterie,The Pests at KC Actors Theatre); and from the spooky (Ghost Light at Kansas City Repertory Theatre) to the purely musical (Cambodian Rock Band at the Alley Theatre, Berkeley Rep, Arena Stage, and ACT/5th Avenue).
As a playwright he has penned an “autobiographical refugee folk musical” The Butcher’s Son, a brilliant retelling of his own family’s immigration saga, created in conjunction with his wife, actor-director-stage-manager Mackenzie Goodwin Tran, and bandmate Benjamin Hart.
The Butcher’s Son received its premiere at Kansas City’s Buffalo Room in 2014 and has toured numerous cities throughout the United States. Nominated for eight awards at the Chicago Theatre Festival, it won for Most Promising Musical and Best Leading Performer (Vi). It has also garnered other awards, including an ArtsKC Inspiration Grant.
And then there’s Vi Tran the singer-songwriter-guitarist-bandleader, wearing the hat that he finds himself donning more and more these days. His extraordinary musical and poetic gifts are obvious in the songs on Goodbye Summer (EP) and American Heroine (album).
In one biography Vi calls himself a “generative performing artist” — primarily, he said with a laugh, because “that’s an easy one for the industry to grasp onto.” (He is, as it happens, a recipient of a 2020 Charlotte Street Foundation Generative Performing Artist Award.)
In addition to all these things, Vi is also a storyteller and (like his paternal grandfather) an architect — “except that I’m an architect of stories,” said the Vietnam-born, Kansas-raised artist, who holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Kansas State University’s theater program. “Sometimes those stories take the form of a song, sometimes they take the form of a play, sometimes it’s a role that I embody on stage.”
Indeed, sometimes Vi tells stories through an event space, as in the Buffalo Room that he and his wife ran for several years “as an incubator and a venue for generative artists.” At the Buffalo Room, for which the Trans served as owner-curators, Vi’s skills as director, presenter, and even impresario, took root and joined the mix.
“That’s what excites me about the creative process,” he said. “That it’s not tied to a particular discipline. It always comes down to, What does this story need? Is this story better served as narrative fiction, or in the ephemeral experience of a three-minute song? To evaluate that is clarifying and edifying, because you are always looking for ways to serve the story.”
Vi carved out a substantial place for himself more than a decade ago, in Kansas City and elsewhere, in established theater works and in his own plays (including an adaptation of The Wind in the Willows for the Okoboji Summer Theatre).
But his primary niche, and one that he has never strayed from, is that of storyteller. Since his boyhood in Garden City, Kansas, he has found himself challenged to be the family chronicler — to tell of the grueling journey from Communist Vietnam to the meat-packing plants of western Kansas.
“When I wrote my first real-life short story as a high school freshman, it got into our school’s literary magazine and won a prize for best fiction,” Vi said. “And my mother came to me and said, You’re the one to tell our story. And I said what are you talking about? I was in high school. That was way too much pressure.
“But I held onto her request, put it in my back pocket, put it in my heart. And I just continued to learn and grow.” Over time, Vi was able to piece together the essentials of his family history, which occasionally found expression in one-off songs and, finally, in The Butcher’s Son.
Using winning songs and gripping narrative, this musical tells of a family fleeing their homeland, being held captive by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, spending two years in a Red Cross refugee camp in Thailand, and arriving, implausibly, in Kansas.
Vi was just a toddler through it all, but even at age two the plucky kid learned to entertain the refugee camp residents — his beginnings, perhaps, in show business.
The musical also tells of losing a father to cancer in 2008: the man who had survived war, terror, and upheaval, and who got his family of four to a safe place before ultimately succumbing to cancer. (Vi plays both himself and his late father in the drama.)
“As diasporic refugees … we are in an impossible place,” he said of the dilemma that most immigrants will face at some point. “The edict that is given to you here is, ‘You’re American now, you’re starting a new life — but don’t forget that you are Vietnamese as well.’ So we exist in this liminal space where we are neither American enough for our peers nor Vietnamese enough for our elders.”
The Butcher’s Son has, not surprisingly, exerted profound and wide-ranging impact. When the company toured the show, they found that its themes struck home with people from all walks.
“An audience member will say, through tears, ‘That was my grandfather.’ Or ‘That was my family,’ even though they might be Latin American and not Vietnamese. Or a Texan, tearing up and saying, ‘I know what it’s like to lose your father, I lost mine to cancer.’ These things unify and humanize us.”
Vi is also proud of the significant roles that he has been able to steward, here and around the nation — “foundational Asian American roles: Quang in Vietgone, The Engineer in Miss Saigon, Song Liling in M. Butterfly, myself and my father in The Butcher’s Son, and covering the two lead roles in Cambodian Rock Band. I take that stewardship very seriously, because I know I’m carrying the weight of these respective communities, their deep histories.”
Yet he hopes for a future in which theater offers more opportunities for Asians and Asian Americans to tell their own stories. He also yearns to play ordinary roles in standard works. He was effective as a Kazakh caregiver in the Actors Theatre’s Dot, and he enjoyed playing Marlin in Finding Nemo and Sheldon/Chenille in Junie B. Jones. “It’s been so nice to be able to do comedies for a change.”
His craving to perform as a musician occupies more and more of his time and energy. Recently we caught up with him at the Chartreuse Saloon downtown, where he performed generous sets of cover songs for a youthful and enthusiastic crowd — a one-man band, singing with his plaintive, assertive voice and accompanying himself on the guitar.
Vi continues writing songs, an activity he likens to a Rubik’s Cube. “Every song, every story, is a puzzle,” he said. “I take great delight in finding the right word, the right phrase, the right rhythm. I love the ‘excavation’ of the creative process, and I want to give the audience the same pleasure that I had in that excavation process.
“I love the double- and triple-entendres, I love writing a great melody and a catchy tune that you can hum along to. And for listeners who choose to dig, there are rewards there too, secrets beneath the surface.”
— By Paul Horsley
For more information go to @vitranmusic on Instagram or X. To reach Paul Horsley, performing arts editor, send an email to paul@kcindependent.com or find him on Facebook (paul.horsley.501) or Twitter/Instagram (@phorsleycritic).
