AATC Announces New Co-Artistic Directors
Asian American Theater Company (AATC) Announces
New Co-Artistic Directors: Duy Nguyen and Alan S. Quismorio
Alan S. Quismorio and Duy Nguyen
29 October 2008 — San Francisco, CA: Celebrating its 35th Anniversary Year, the Asian American Theater Company (www.asianamericantheater.org) proudly announces that Duy Nguyen and Alan S. Quismorio have joined the company as Co-Artistic Directors.
AATC has a rich legacy and so many artists brimming with talent. Alan and I take on the mantle of Co-artistic Directors with the determination to build bridges, unleash dreams, and embed institutions to allow our artists to dare, to dream, and to come alive as a creative community, said Duy Nguyen. AATC will definitely be different, not in repudiation of the past, but in focusing on new works and creating an artistic environment in which emerging artists work together to create new opportunities for other artists.
It is a pleasure to share this position with Duy, a friend and colleague I have known for a number of years and whose creativity I hold in esteem, said Alan Quismorio. From an aesthetic perspective, some might describe Duy as being more edgy and me as more traditional, but the truth is that we can each be both. While style, content, and life experiences indeed govern our differences, we are alike in our goal to take AATC on an entirely new journey.
That journey began in different ways for the two Co-Artistic Directors. Duy emigrated from Vietnam and received his BA in English from UC Berkeley. His theater training also began at Berkeley, but continued as he lived overseas, immersing himself in the multi-media theater scene in Prague and in a traditional water puppetry apprenticeship in Vietnam. Duy founded Theater Rice and One4All Theater, as well as the comedy group Kamikaze Theory and the improv group Hobofish. As a writer and director, he has worked with various Bay Area companies over the past decade, including Z Space, Jon Sims Center, Theater Yugen, Center for Theater Arts, and AATC, where he directed Alex Park’s Rental Car in 2004 and AATC’s NewWorks Incubator Playwrights Workshop in 2008.
Alan received his BA in Radio and Television from San Francisco State University and has been a long-time actor, director and producer in the Bay Area. As an actor, Alan is a member of Crowded Fire Theater Company, and has appeared in Trevor Allen’s 49 Miles, Naomi Wallace’s Slaughter City, and Liz Duffy Adams’ One Big Lie. He also worked for 8 years with AlchemySF, serving as its Artistic Director and directing several plays, including Harry Cronin’s Dark Matter and Joe Jennison’s A Beautiful Man, which won “Best of Fringe” honors at the 2003 San Francisco Fringe Festival. Alan’s career with AATC began in 1996, when he starred in Chay Yew’s A Language of Their Own, directed by East-West Players’ Tim Dang.
For the 2009 Season, Duy and Alan will open in the spring with the AATC NewWorks Incubator Showcase, featuring two weeks of 6-8 stage-read/workshopped plays featuring new writers from across the country. It features cutting edge new work, including:
- Paul Heller’s 6-part Mini-Theatrical series Beijing, California, which portrays a futuristic society where America is a third world country occupied by China. This piece is being developed through AATC’s experimental branch, One4All Theater.
- Duy Nguyen’s Blood Is Thick, a total theater experience that surrounds the audience with four stages as they follow the devious schemes of a drug addict who invents the biggest lie ever in the search for a normal life.
In June-July, AATC will present the world premiere of Aurorae Khoo’s Fayette-Nam, winner of The Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation “Emerging Playwright” Grant. This is a barrier-breaking play about an enlisted African American teen caught in a romantic triangle—with not only a middle-aged, Asian “Southern Belle” but also her daughter, a college student who just ran away from her Ivy League school after burning down her dorm. AATC will collaborate with The Lorraine Hansberry Theatre in developing and casting this piece.
AATC is also working with Philip Kan Gotanda and Campo Santo on Mr. Gotanda’s newest work, #5 The Angry Red Drum, a provocative, new, multi-disciplinary work that builds on the theater-music-and-movement experiments that Mr. Gotanda introduced in A Fist of Roses.
AATC is also developing Macho Bravado, Alex Park’s new play about an Asian American soldier returning home to his pregnant Caucasian wife and her family. First seen in AATC’s NewWorks Incubator Playwrights Workshop, Macho Bravado explores how the ideals of masculinity warp both men and their relationships. AATC is excited to be working again with Mr. Park, one of the brightest emerging playwrights in the Bay Area.
Alan and Duy are working together to make AATC a great home for Asian American playwrights and actors, said Pearl Wong, AATC’s Interim Managing Director and a member of the sketch comedy troupe, the 18 Mighty Mountain Warriors.
Darryl Chiang, AATC’s Interim Executive Director and Board Chair, said he is “inspired by our new Co-Artistic Directors’ energy and vision, and by the depth of their professional theater experience. We are going to have an amazing 2009 Season…and just wait until you see what they have planned for 2010!”
About AATC
The mission of the Asian American Theater Company is to connect people to Asian American cultures through theater. AATC was established in 1973 to develop and present original works of theater about Americans of Asian and Pacific Islander descent. Thirty-five years later, we are still committed to producing groundbreaking, entertaining and innovative art. We are not only a production company that presents mainstage plays, but also a workshop where Asian Pacific American writers, actors and directors can explore ideas, understanding that we won’t always know where those ideas will lead. Whether these works end up in video, on film or on stage, they carry with them AATC’s purpose: to explore who we are as a people and a community, and in so doing, to bring us closer together.
