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If this were the beginning of a Qui Nguyen play, it would probably start with a high school dweeb accidentally opening a gateway to Hell. Or a ninja-style throwdown between two Manhattan street toughs and a Brooklyn gang lord. There would be a gleeful torrent of elaborate fight scenes, machine-gun barrages of snappy banter and enough profanity to make David Mamet blush.Now, if this sounds more like a movie or a comic book than a play, don't worry: that's the idea. For most of the past decade, Nguyen has been on a self-appointed mission to make theatre safe for dorks. As the resident playwright for New York City's Vampire Cowboys Theatre Company(where he is also co-artistic director), he has written an onslaught of irreverent, action-packed geekfests designed to (a) show the hipster and fanboy crowds that theatre can be cool and fun, and (b) make several genres that have long been associated with other media—science fiction, horror, martial arts—palatable for theatrical consumption.
Since 2007, all of Nguyen's plays for Vampire Cowboys—which include the horror movie-inspired Alice in Slasherland, the blaxpoitation samurai mash-up Soul Samurai and Fight Girl Battle World, his love letter to sci-fi—have sold out their runs, primarily on strong word of mouth. Nguyen's rapidly growing fan base, built from both the indie theatre and Comic-Concrowds, anticipates his plays with the kind of giddy enthusiasm usually reserved for the latest Harry Potter movie. The crowd at one of Nguyen's shows can be a show unto itself—waves of raucous laughter crash through the theatre while loud cheers and gasps of awe and terror converge like Voltron. It's like watching Independence Day and a Dane Cook concert simultaneously.
Critics and peers are also starting to get with the program. Soul Samurai nabbed a GLAAD Media Award nomination, and Fight Girl scored a New York Innovative Theatre Award nomination for outstanding full-length script. In 2006, Vampire Cowboys landed the NYIT Foundation's Caffe Cino Fellowship Award, a cash prize "for consistent production of outstanding work." And this past spring, the company was awarded a prestigious Obie grant.
This season, Nguyen kicks things up another notch with two projects that promise to take him where he hasn't gone before. Beginning Mar. 31, Vampire Cowboys premieres his newest play,The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G., at New York's Incubator Arts Project. The semi-autobiographical tale—which aims to turn the lesser-known genre of Asian identity plays on its ear—features Nguyen himself as a lead character, struggling to write a meaningful drama about his cousin's true life journey to America, and constantly getting razzed by the other characters for putting himself in his own play.
Then, Nguyen takes his act to the West Coast with Krunk Fu Battle Battle, a new hip-hop musical commissioned by Los Angeles's East West Players that runs May 12-June 26. The project, about a kung fu teen who battles a shogun and his henchmen, marks Nguyen's musical theatre debut and the first time in recent memory he'll be premiering a new work without his longtime Vampire Cowboys collaborators by his side.
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| Nguyen at left (photo by Nathan Lemoine); right, Paco Tolson, Temar Underwood and Melissa Paladino in Fight Girl Battle World, by Vampire Comboys, 2008 (photo by Theresa Squire) |
Despite the exuberant absurdity of making a snarky teddy bear a major character in Alice in Slasherland (achieved with animatronics) and of Soul Samurai's bloodthirsty title character greeting the audience with a casual "Moshi moshi, muthafuckahs," Nguyen is no gag writer. "I don't set out to write comedies," he says, explaining that his initial goal is "usually to make the audience cheer." Taking his cue from action/adventure genres, Nguyen says he's "more interested in writing something that's high-adrenaline—it's about that kind of thrill that you get." That thrill fuels his never-ending desire to attempt the seemingly impossible on stage, like disemboweling a demon (which he did in Alice in Slasherland) or staging an outer-space dogfight (a highlight from Fight Girl, done with hand-held mock-ups and puppeteers).
Still, he realizes "there's going to be something inherently funny" about seeing such moments performed live on stage, and confesses that he relishes making "people's heads explode with laughter." Nguyen is quick to point out that his plays are never meant to be campy: "When we're doing a samurai play, we're legitimately trying to do a samurai play"—but he admits his plays are intended to simultaneously celebrate and send up whatever genre he's tackling. Case in point: The scene in which a sword-wielding Ophelia (yes, Shakespeare's Ophelia) singlehandedly takes on an army of ninja zombies in Living Dead in Denmark, Nguyen's tongue-in-cheek zombie sequel to Hamlet, hilariously (and intentionally) evokes both Kill Bill and Charlie's Angels while blazing its own iconic trail.
Given his proclivity for rapid-fire, profanity-laced repartee, strong-but-sexy female protagonists and a preference for creating new genre archetypes, it's not surprising that Nguyen's idols are screenwriters Joss Whedon and Kevin Smith and comic book writer Brian K. Vaughan. Though he's a playwright of color, he insists he has no political or racial axe to grind. But, as his colleagues insist, that doesn't mean there's not more going on underneath the surface of his blood-splattering antics.
Vampire Cowboys co-artistic director Robert Ross Parker, who directs all of Nguyen's plays for the company, thinks his creative partner's humor "comes from approaching style and genre very seriously." Actor Paco Tolson, a Vampire Cowboys regular, marvels at the "giddy disregard for limitation in Qui's work. There are no taboos. Race, sex and politics are all fair game to him." (Italics and embolding mine, of course. -PT) Carlo Alban, who played lead roles in both Denmark and Slasherland, calls Nguyen "a quiet revolutionary, a subversive, a ninja." And Maureen Sebastian, who portrayed the title role in Soul Samurai, praises Nguyen for stretching "the boundaries of what a script can do," and, in turn, "what American theatre can do."
Nguyen's distinctive style came about, in part, in reaction to his grad school instructors' insistence that visual, action-based stories were more appropriate for film than theatre. "It was about talking, talking, talking, but never showing," he recalls. "Do you think Shakespeare thought about that? In Romeo and Juliet, they shouldn't have a sword fight because we're a talking medium?" Nguyen rebelled against such conventional notions and began churning out a body of work that comes off like a collection of rowdy mash notes to pop culture.
The love affair began in his hometown El Dorado, Ark., where his Vietnamese parents reared him on kung fu movies because they wanted him to see stories where the heroes were Asian. Furthermore, they boldly taught him that most of the world was Asian and looked like him, so he wouldn't feel out of place in ethnically barren Arkansas. It was a calculated exaggeration that gave Nguyen, in his words, "great self-esteem" and a trove of inspiration.
Nguyen's heritage provides the source material for The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G., in which the author insists he will not be playing himself. ("I'm no actor" he says; the role of "Qui" will be played by a professional.) In the script, however, as Nguyen the character gets bogged down by uncertainty, Nguyen the writer increasingly explodes both style and form, playing with a revolving door of genres. "When people meet me and find out I write plays, they assume a lot of times that I write serious Asian drama," he says, eager to crack viewer expectations wide open with a well-placed theatrical roundhouse kick.
With Krunk Fu Battle Battle (which features a score by Beau Sia and Marc Macalintal), Nguyen takes the plunge into musical book-writing, a job for which East West's artistic director Tim Dang thinks the playwright is well suited. "Qui's writing is 'now,' it's 'today,'" Dang says. "It ventures out into hip-hop, poetry, anime, but it can still be accessible to a diverse audience." Those qualities led Dang to commission Nguyen, whose career he'd been following for several years, to pen the family-friendly tuner. For Nguyen, it's a happy return to the aesthetic territory of Soul Samurai. "My favorite things in the world are early '80s hip-hop, comic books and samurai stories," he says, excited about the opportunity to once again write something that incorporates all three.
No matter what genre he's working in, Nguyen's goal remains the same: "to show that theatre is just as cool as waiting in line to see the latest movie blockbuster."
Michael Criscuolo is a New York-based actor and writer. He is currently starring in the premiere of Tim Errickson's play, Endless Summer Nights, for Boomerang Theatre Company.
