Inside A.C.T.

By Simon Hodgson Suzan-Lori Parks reached down to the black case beside her chair and took out her guitar. “It’s about listening in,” she said, gesturing with her free hand. On the 8th floor of A.C.T.’s administrative offices at 30 Grant Avenue, three dozen young actors from the M.F.A. Program leaned in, watching the strings, waiting for the notes. Slowly, the playwright and songwriter of Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) started a steady rhythm, light and even.  Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and A.C.T. Dramaturg Michael Paller with actors from A.C.T.'s M.F.A. Program. Photo by Taylor Steinbeck. “When I was in rehearsal for Father Comes Home ,” she said, fingers still strumming the strings, “I was playing the musician [the role currently played by Bay Area musician Martin Luther McCoy at The Geary]. I was watching Odyssey Dog and thinking, ‘What am I hearing?’” She mimed a dog’s back paw reaching up to scratch its ear, then changed the guitar rhythm to a...

By Taylor Steinbeck When the cast and creative team of Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) flew in to San Francisco from Yale Repertory Theatre last week, their meet and greet at A.C.T. was more like a reunion than a first rehearsal. In a case of life imitating art, A.C.T. and Yale Rep’s co-production of Suzan-Lori Parks's Father Comes Home —beginning performances tomorrow at The Geary Theater—is a homecoming story not just for the characters in the play, but also for the artists involved. (From L to R) Julian Elijah Martinez, Michael J. Asberry, James Udom, Kadeem Ali Harris, Liz Diamond, Carey Perloff, Britney Frazier, Martin Luther McCoy, Eboni Flowers, and Gregory Wallace at the first San Francisco rehearsal of A.C.T. and Yale Repertory Theatre's 2018 production of Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3) . Photo by Taylor Steinbeck. Actors Steven Anthony Jones (The Oldest Old Man) and Gregory Wallace (Odyssey Dog), who were both a part...

By Taylor Steinbeck From Platoon (1986) to the Rambo series (1982–2008) to Miss Saigon (1989), “the main protagonist is always a white guy going to Vietnam and [the] Vietnamese are the bad guys being shot at or they are the people who need saving,” said playwright Qui Nguyen in a 2016 Rolling Stone interview. So Nguyen created Vietgone as an antidote to the “white savior” tale. Its characters are proudly Vietnamese and fully capable of saving themselves. By giving his characters dimension and agency, Nguyen attempts to reclaim how Vietnamese people have been represented on stage and screen, and makes them the heroes of their own story. Tong (Janelle Chu) flirts with Quang (James Seol) in A.C.T.'s 2018 production of Vietgone . Photo by Kevin Berne. In Miss Saigon , “Vietnam is a place not worth saving, and America is a holy grail worth killing and dying for,” writes journalist Diep Tran in her American Theatre magazine article “I Am Miss Saigon , and I Hate It.” The ...

By Taylor Steinbeck For over six months, 13 young theater artists from various departments of A.C.T.’s Fellowship Program have come together to produce not one, but two plays in a project that will culminate in performances this week. Running April 19–22 at A.C.T.’s Costume Shop, the production features the work of Obie Award–winning playwrights Caryl Churchill and José Rivera with Far Away and Brainpeople , respectively. Both these plays tackle war, fear, and oppression through a dystopian lens, speaking volumes about the world we live in today. In celebration of this project marking the fifth consecutive year of the Fellowship Project, we spoke to some of this year's fellows about their experiences. The 2017–18 A.C.T. Fellows involved in The A.C.T. Fellowship Project 2018. Photo by Allie Moss. Nora Zahn (Director of Far Away ): Being a part of this project from beginning to end has taught me a ton, especially when it comes to all the tiny details that go into making a...

By Michael Paller Growing up in Arkansas with Vietnamese refugee parents, Qui Nguyen loved hip-hop, action movies, and comic books. So when he began writing plays, he filled them with these passions: martial arts in Begets: Fall of a High School Ronin , superheroes in Men of Steel , and zombies in Alice in Slasherland . Many of these works were written for Nguyen’s Obie Award–winning “geek theater” company, Vampire Cowboys. We caught up with Nguyen in anticipation of his takeover of A.C.T.'s Strand Theater this upcoming week— Vietgone is playing in The Rembe and Begets  is playing in The Rueff—to talk to the man behind the work. This is Part Two. Artwork for A.C.T's Young Conservatory production of  Begets: Fall of a High School Ronin .   In a moment when the issue of refugees is more charged and divisive than it’s been for generations, what do you hope an audience might take away from Vietgone ? Politics can quickly dehumanize people, while the goal o...

By Taylor Steinbeck While A.C.T. was founded on three pillars—dynamic productions, actor training, and community engagement—the last of those keystones often merits more celebration. Cheri Miller is a Detroit-born, San Francisco–based performer who acted in A.C.T.’s Education & Community Programs’ 2016 collaborative production, Crack. Rumble. Fly.: The Bayview Studies Project . After working for more than a decade in a series of different industries, Miller fell in love with acting and first got involved with A.C.T. in 2013. A tireless advocate of theater arts and social justice, Miller is a great example of a theater-maker using her talent and passion to create. We sat down with Miller to talk about taking chances, taking classes, and taking up space.  Cheri Miller in A.C.T.'s Every 28 Hours: Black Arts Festival 2018 . Photo by Jay Yamada Why did you decide to get so involved with A.C.T.? When I made my stage debut in 2013 on the A.C.T. Stage Coach for Juneteenth, I re...

By Elspeth Sweatman At first glance, science and theater may seem like chalk and cheese. These two fields, however, have been intimately connected for centuries. As Renaissance scientists such as Galileo, Copernicus, and da Vinci were discovering new aspects of our world, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century playwrights were referencing these discoveries in their works. Sarah Grace Wilson as Georgie Burns and James Carpenter as Alex Priest in A.C.T.'s 2018 production of Heisenberg . Photo by Kevin Berne. The protagonist of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus embraces the Renaissance spirit of scientific exploration to his own detriment, and Subtle, one of the three conmen in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist , relies on the cutting-edge (and spurious) science of alchemy—transforming base metals into gold—to trick the wealthy Sir Epicure Mammon. Since these early depictions of science and scientists onstage, playwrights have used the latest scientific innovations as metaphors, a ...

By Taylor Steinbeck  Like many Americans,  Vietgone  playwright Qui Nguyen grew up watching Hollywood Vietnam War films such as Stanley Kubrick’s  Full Metal Jacket , but he struggled to identify with the Vietnamese characters because of how they were written. The characters often speak in an accented, pidgin English that is used either as a joke, or to exoticize them. In  Full Metal Jacket , American soldiers Private Joker and Private Rafterman are approached by a Da Nang sex worker, played by Anglo Chinese actress Papillon Soo Soo. She convinces the men to pay for her services by saying, “Me so horny. Me love you long time.” This line has since become engrained in American pop culture, referenced in television series including  Family Guy  and  South Park , and sampled in the rap hits 2 Live Crew’s “Me So Horny” and Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back.” The depiction of Vietnamese characters in this way is damaging because they are presented as al...