Comedy, Vietnamese culture, artificial intelligence and pho are all on the menu in “My Home on the Moon,” a play set in a pho restaurant threatened by gentrification.
There are also existential choices, simulated worlds and ancient Vietnamese ancestors who take the form of 60-foot-long pho noodles — all on the stage of the San Francisco Playhouse.
As the play opens, Lan, the restaurant’s owner, is fighting to keep her restaurant open as storefront after storefront closes in the surrounding (unnamed) neighborhood due to gentrification. In hopes of saving the restaurant, Lan gets a grant from a tech company, which sends a woman named Vera to help. Soon, the restaurant is undergoing renovations and extensive changes.
As the action rolls along, Mai, a Vietnamese chef at the restaurant, falls in love with Vera, an AI bot, which makes for some unusual complications.
“She’s an AI, so she doesn’t know how to cook,” said Hmong-Vietnamese playwright Minna Lee, the play’s author, in an interview with The Examiner. “Actually, she doesn’t know how to eat.”
As the changes at the restaurant continue, in a wildly unpredictable turn of events, the characters find themselves in a simulation — an alternative reality. It’s an altogether different development than what one might expect.
“I wasn’t interested in writing a preachy story about how gentrification is wrong,” said Lee. “Instead, the play explores how ancestral knowledge and artificial intelligence can come together to conjure new possibilities.”
Exactly how that ancestral knowledge is represented onstage is one of the most inventive aspects of the play.
Most Bay Area folks are familiar with the long, thin noodles that come coiled in every bowl of pho. These noodles come to life in the play, conveying the wisdom of Lan’s ancestors through movement and gesture.
It took about three months to arrive at the perfect design for the noodles, said Jacquelyn Scott, a San Francisco resident who has designed props and sets for the Playhouse and other San Francisco theaters for more than a decade.
The noodles are made of flexible silicone, with the longest about 60 feet long. They’re so prominent in the play that they function as main characters.
“They are pointing the way, metaphorically and literally,” Scott said.
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The noodles are just one example of the innovations in “Moon,” Lee’s first theatrical work to be produced. The set goes through a radical transformation into an AI simulation.
“It starts off in a mom-and-pop-sized Vietnamese restaurant, one that Bay Area residents would easily recognize,” said Tanya Orellana, the set designer.
“It starts to get upgraded in a way, but begins to look more artificial, polished and slick,” a change accomplished by switching from more natural-seeming lighting to LED lights, among other things, Orellana said.
The play was still a work in progress three weeks before its Jan. 25 world premiere, according to Mei Ann Teo, the play’s director.
“The script has gone through a lot of changes,” Teo said. “The people in the play and what they are to each other has changed and is in the process of changing.”
“I absolutely am having the time of my life working on this because it requires so much imagination to create not only several realms of reality but several spiritual realms,” Teo said.
“Moon” is the second of two experimental dramas to be produced at the Playhouse during the 2023-24 season. The other, presented in the fall, was “Nollywood Dreams.” The term “Nollywood” is a play on “Bollywood,” India’s Hindi film industry; Nollywood is the Nigerian version.
The classic “Guys and Dolls” played from Nov. 16 through Jan.13, and two other well-known classics — “The 39 Steps” and “The Glass Menagerie” — are coming up later this year.
The productions strike a balance between showing dependable theatrical works, a tactic many beleaguered post-pandemic theaters have chosen to draw people in, and using fresh material.
“When you expand the canon, audiences are excited to see new stories. We all are interested to see diverse material,” Orellana said. “Everyone likes new stories.”
