Tonya Jone Miller knew her American mother and Vietnamese father embarked for Vietnam around the same time as American troops, but she never knew why. After videotaping her mother tell her stories, Miller stitched the anecdotes together into a one-woman show about her mother maneuvering between two cultures in a moment of political hostility. With heavy-handed tone setting, Threads begins with gunshots sounding over Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” and Miller acting as her mother, fearfully running across the stage. When the shooting subsides, she tells of her journey from Indiana to California to Vietnam in 1968, where she taught English and had many gut-wrenching experiences helping desperate people. With no scenes or set changes, and in a continuous address to the audience, Threads feels more like an hour of storytelling than a play. Though personally significant for both Miller and her mother, Threads is neither cogent nor novel to the objective observer.