Michelle Aguillon was drawn to "Miss Saigon" for its love story, its spectacle, and its musical score. But as she began directing Turtle Lane Playhouse's production of the Broadway hit in Newton, things got more personal.

"Little did I know how much of it I had witnessed and had in me," said Aguillon, a Filipino American whose father died during the fall of Saigon.

The story is basically a remake of "Madame Butterfly," but set in Saigon. Kim, a young girl driven to prostitution after losing her family, is sold to a GI named Chris for a night. The pair fall in love, but as Saigon falls, they lose each other in the chaos. Chris evacuates, thinking Kim is dead, and later marries; meanwhile, Kim raises their baby. When they finally reunite, Kim, heartbroken and hoping for a better life for her son, takes her own life so that Chris will raise their child in America.

The authors, Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg, wrote the play after seeing a photo of a woman giving up her child at a Saigon airport so the child could grow up in the states.

Aguillon knows the controversial stories of postwar adoptions all too well.

"My father was a loadmaster on the C5 that was taking children from Vietnam to the United States on Operation Babylift in 1975. It was the first plane out, and it failed, and he was killed," she said.

For Aguillon, who grew up on military bases, Kim's story is familiar in other ways as well. "There were a lot of interracial marriages between military persons and local women, and those women were treated differently than women who married their own kind," said Aguillon.

"Friends of mine that I grew up with were products of these relationships, and I'm Filipino, but I look [only] half Filipino, so I myself got treated a certain way because people assumed my father was white and that my mother was one of 'those women.' "

Tuned to the racism, the desperation, and the confusion that surrounded wartime prostitution and romance, Aguillon aimed to bring this knowledge to bear on Turtle Lane's "Miss Saigon."

"I've tried to sprinkle in as many things as I could without changing the play," said Aguillon, who won an award for directing in 2004 from the Independent Reviewers of New England.

Her touch is subtle. Thuy, the vengeful Vietnamese suitor whom Kim spurns, is portrayed as acting out of hurt, not hatefulness. "We see vulnerable things from this character that I've not normally seen," she said. One of the women from the brothel is shown sneaking a meeting with her Vietnamese lover. The moment is brief, but it's drawn from the life of a military wife Aguillon knew.

And when a US Army helicopter leaves a throng of Vietnamese refugees behind, the cast will play the scene knowing the full history. "I did a lot of research," said Aguillon, who lives in Medford. "I found out that a lot of those refugees were waiting at the gates for days, being promised that they would get to leave. Knowing that adds something different for the actors."