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It's Phuc Tap!

nytheatre.com review by Jonathan Calindas
August 15, 2005

The amiable and charming actress Eileen Fogarty was born of an Irish father and a Vietnamese mother, but unlike her four siblings she does not possess any of the physical traits of her Irish lineage. This intriguing fact, which she drops at the start of her one-woman autobiographical show It's Phuc Tap!, later becomes the main thrust of this one-hour play.Fogarty’s father was an Irishman who owned a shipping company and her mother was a nurse. They met in Vietnam during the war and later split; her mother went to live in the United States, and her father lived with the children in Singapore. In an amusing series of anecdotes, which take Fogarty and her siblings from Singapore to Los Angeles, she tells of what it was like to look completely Asian and have a completely Irish name. These seem cliche at first, especially to a New York audience where internationalism is not particularly unusual, but as the show progresses we realize that this serves to set up her story which begins when, after a careless comment from her Aunt Thuy, she starts to question her true genetic lineage. In the ensuing journey, Fogarty explores what truly makes us what we are and who we consider to be our true parents along with the rich heritage that they pass on.The piece is perfectly at home at the cabaret room of the Collective: Unconscious space. The actress’s proximity to the audience creates an atmosphere so intimate that even lighting changes seem intrusive. Fogarty is endearing as she plays the various characters in her story, including her father “who looks like Clint Eastwood” and her delightful, complex mother, but she is most effective when she plays herself because it is then that we understand what the story means to her. The story is so undeniably hers that the seamless direction by Jean Collins and Christine Schoenwald is virtually undetectable.The colorfully phonetic title, by the way, is never mentioned in the show, but according to the press materials, it is Vietnamese for “it’s complicated.”