American Theater magazine article

Here is a link to the article in American Theater on Qui Nguyen, co-artistic director of Vampire Cowboys, in which I am quoted.  It's by Michael Criscuolo.  When he approached me to submit my two cents on working with Qui he warned that what I wrote may be used in part or not at all.  I wrote about three pages to make ensure some pithy nugget made it past the editors, and voila!

The article in full is reposted below if you just hate following links or can't wait to get to it.

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.

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.

Lonely Leela

Dear friend Rehana Mirza's multimedia play Lonely Leela is getting a showcase through New Georges next week and we had our first rehearsal today.  It's an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland/Alice Through the Looking Glass and it's mostly set within the fantastical world of the internet wherein the inhabitants are all puppets designed by Spica Webb.  Today was mostly getting to know what you can do with her puppets and how to best facilitate a wide range of expression.  There are finger puppets, hand puppets, sock puppets and rod puppets, each with different demands on the actor.  They mainly have gigantic eyes and hilarious tufts of hair.  The script is wild and deals with a ton of unexpected actions from the characters and I kid you not, every spare moment I had I was trying to get one of them to look like they were riding a segway as called for in the text.

I think challenge-based productions are a ton of fun and necessitate new ideas, bringing out the best creativity juices.  Very excited.

Some Summer Things

A few things that blew my mind this summer.



















1.  Conor McPherson's film The Eclipse starring Ciaran Hinds, Aidan Quinn, Jim Norton and Iben Hjejle.  This has all the trappings of a supernatural story (McPherson's white whale and perpetual theme of his plays) and has three moments that scared me more than any movie I've seen in years, but it's really about the complicated relationship between three writers over the course of a literary festival in Ireland.  Ghost story, yes, but it's mostly an intimate, meditative film with a European pace.  The acting and writing are off the charts.  This is something I saw late at night while Kate was sleeping, and a few times I was sure I woke her up because I screamed out loud.  That's right, I said it.

2.  Justin Cronin's novel The Passage.  This is still in hardcover and can be found at bigger retailers where people sit in the aisles all day and it is at these places that I have been reading the shit out of it for free just like I did with Stephen King's mostly excellent Under the Dome.  I'm not even done (it's about 500 pages), but I don't care, it's that good.  It's going in.  I feel like I looked into this book based on the jacket reviews from other writers (including King) not knowing anything about it and was rewarded handsomely so I won't tell too much, but it's a showcase of what it means to be entertained as you read.  In the same way that Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves is a reading experience, Cronin has thought of everything and uses a wide array of narrative devices to keep things engaging.  Don't want it to end.  The only thing is that it is apparently a first novel in an upcoming trilogy and the groundwork-laying for the coming volumes is fairly obvious.  I got through 200 pages and was like, "You're sure taking your sweet time with this character introduction," you know what I mean?  Still amazing. Light years better than Guillermo del Toro's The Strain which is, at bottom, the same story.

3.  Antichrist by Lars von Trier starring Willem Defoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg.  I saw this late at night, too.  This is classic von Trier. Pompous, gorgeous, sublimated fear of women.  I am still really confused by it and by the things I saw take place, but it is highly polarizing by design.  Cannes audiences loved or hated it, with people walking out and exclaiming things.  People from every side are up in arms over some of the things that take place, and that of course is the point.  He's a provocateur.  It's pretty innovative cinematographically, writing and story aside, and it's almost worth it for that.  Not for the squeamish or those without a sense of humor as black as night.


Was very disappointed to not be able to see much theater this summer although Kate had two award-winning productions at the Looking Glass.

I also had the pleasure of working with her on some of the most enlightening short film work I've done.  We wrapped The Diary Thief with the help of so many friends after shooting in every far off corner of the city with basically no crew during the worst heat wave I've ever had in New York.  I am actually sitting here sweating my face off as I write this since it's still blazing outside.

Tzipora Kaplan, also of Kate's production company See Films, directed a music video I was in at her office and it was a ton of fun.  No pics yet.  It'll premiere with a slew of other original music videos on my birthday at Bar13 near NYU.

Just trying to get as much camera time in before LA.

New York Innovative Theater Award Nomination

I am happy to finally be able to report here that the NYIT Awards, which are the TONYS of the Off-Off Broadway world, have nominated me for Best Actor in a Featured Role for my work in Temar Underwood's play The Brokenhearteds.  It's an honor and a great encouragement for Temar's fledgling company I Mean! Productions.  You've got to hear him say the company name out loud.  It's hilarious. 

Here's an official announcement with myself sharing the headline with Susan Louise O'Connor and Harris Yulin (!!!) on Theatermania.

This is my third IT Award nomination after being up for Featured Actor in Vampire Cowboys' Fight Girl Battle World and, along with the cast, winning Best Ensemble for that one, too.

I'm thrilled and excited for everyone who is included here and for the recognition of this level of theater-making that the awards provide.

The Tenant

Something else happening now that is really intriguing me is the work happening at rehearsals for Woodshed Collective's adaptation of Topor's The Tenant.  First of all, the level of intelligence and dramatic inquiry going on at these rehearsals is blowing my mind.  It's kind of a complicated story how it all works and where it's going, but what is so intriguing is the process.

Teddy Bergman (Woodshed Co-Artistic Director) and Stephen Brackett are co-directing a site-specific piece that involves peering into the worlds of the various tenants who share a building with the protagonist.  In the Polanski movie version, the lives of the others are just hinted at, and multiple playwrights have been employed to flesh out each room's tenants.  Sarah Burgess is writing our segment, and Jocelyn Kuritsky and Black-Eyed Susan are performing it with me.

A question that is immediately clear from our first investigations into a piece like this is how to dramatize the internal lives of literary characters and communicate their rich thought processes.  What is so wonderful about the source material is excavating the justifications for the characters' extreme actions, something which is fairly virgin territory.  We're blazing a mental path, but without an omniscient narrator or voiceover, how can we physically lead the audience along it?  

Auden Reznor

Two quotes recently slammed together in my brain as I went about my Thursday.

The first is from The Cambridge Campanion to W.H. Auden.  Oddly, enough, it's not a bit of literary criticism from a critic but from Auden himself writing in the introduction to his 1935 anthology The Poet's Tongue, quoted by Stan Smith in the introduction (I tried but didn't really make it too far past the introduction, to be honest):

'Of the many definitions of poetry, the simplest is still the best: "memorable speech."'

This rattled around in my brain and then collided with a quote by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails from an interview regarding the release of their then-new album With Teeth, something that has stayed up there for about four years waiting to be utilized in my blog.  In his characteristically laconic (and arguably adolescent) style, he likens the songs on the album to "twelve good punches in the face."

What is poetry?  Why is it something I like in my limited experience of it?  What is any (literary) art form valued for?  I determined that I like poetry and plays and books because they wrestle the expansiveness of human experience and feeling into the rigors of language. 

The epic nature of human experience cannot be circumscribed neatly within the scope of our language, and yet, against all odds, some people try.  How to describe it?  When our best writers use words (with all their strictures) to engage with amorphous things like life and emotion, the experience of reading is transcendent because the words rise above their ordinary meanings, their base origins, and evoke more than they should.

Words, well written, give us a means to engage with our greatest human questions.

Good writing should have the same impact that a track from With Teeth has.  It should feel like a punch in the face. Was Reznor being poetic when he said that?  According to Auden, yes.  God knows what that meeting of minds would be like.

Music and it's qualities are still a mystery to me, though, and I have no idea why I like one thing over another.  Sometimes I'll love the melody and hate the lyrics, sometimes the opposite, sometimes I will hate a song and it becomes my favorite in time.  I can only think to say that sometimes, when everything is aligned, a good song's effect is magical.  They're musical poetry.

Updates

Hey, All of You, my legion of loyal blog followers who have been missing my pithy posts about what's going on in my brain for the past six months!  There's a lot to talk about.

The first thing is that my manager's office SirenSong Entertainment now has a fabulous web presence here. You can click on my profile and see pictures, read press quotes, and get career updates.*  It's a very impressive site and you can find many other incredible actors there including frequent collaborators Will Harper and Hoon Lee.  Huzzah to Donna DeStefano and her industrious interns!
     
*Just as I was writing that line, the half-melted italian ice I was eating spilled all over me and all over my bed. Watermelon.  Goddammit!)

The second thing is that I have, with the aid of my dear friend Jon Hoche, co-written my first ever play, Subterranea.  Jon and I play estranged brothers named Nick and Dick Brotowski who are thrust together by fate to fight Nazis at the center of the Earth.  We had been toying with the ideas and their execution when Carla Ching, artistic director of Second Generation Theater Company (2g), offered us a proving ground in the form of their new play festival In The Works this past June.  It was a giant step forward for us and we are so grateful for their support.  (We are also indebted to the rest of our cast*: Jackie Chung, Cindy Cheung, and Erica Swindell--as well as our director, Robert Ross Parker.)  The best thing about the process was to work so closely with trusted and admired colleagues.  It was a dream come true.

*Jesus Christ, the phone is ringing off the hook!  My friend Gabi just called and we caught up on the last six months.  He's currently head of production at Digital Kitchen and recently got back together with his girlfriend.  That's the short version.


Also, I was in Michi Barall's new play Rescue Me Off-Broadway with another stellar creative team.  I listed them all already so I won't get into it here, but they were so much fun and I learned a lot from them.  Mostly, though, I learned never to operate puppets after taking claritin.  No, iced coffee does not mitigate the attendant drowsiness.

More to come, as always.