Amputees by Quentin Nguyen-Duy | Director by Sarah Shin | Scenic Design by Emma Barron | Lighting Design by Danielle Elegy | Costume Design by Maddy Brown | Sound Design by Feitong Wang | All photos by Andrew Brilliant
“The funny in Amputees, directed by Sarah Shin (CFA’19), begins with Nguyen-Duy’s description of the setting: ‘…. Above the couch hangs an altar. On the altar is a black-and-white photo of a Vietnamese man. He looks disappointed. The floor is slightly bent.’” - Joel Brown, BU Today
“Playwright Quentin Nguyen is still a student, he has enormous potential to build upon this work throughout the rest of his career, and I’m interested to see what’s next.” - Olivia Hart, The Simmons Voice
AMPUTEES
First-generation Vietnamese-American Sam Nguyen is home for the Holidays. In hopes of reassembling the family, his father, Vietnamese-born Phuong Nguyen, calls for a reunion to celebrate the family’s “Asian LunarMas” — a hybridized creation which binds the Vietnamese Tết with the Western celebration of Christmas. Forced to rekindle his relationship with his schizoaffective brother and estranged mother, Sam seeks to find the origins of his family’s trauma in his father’s past. When the past becomes blurred with the present, Sam is confronted with an ugly family history that is not so far from his own.
NERVE ENDINGS
Ansel and Izzy are at a wedding neither of them wants to be at. Even worse, they’re stuck in a time loop. Over the course of an evening—or maybe an eternity—they’re forced to confront their broken friendship, separate battles with addiction, and the dreams they left unfulfilled. Nerve Endings looks at the cyclical nature of relationships, addiction, and the cost of mending a severed connection.
Nerve Endings by Quentin Nguyen-duy at the UCSD Wagner Theatre Festival | Directed by Kieran Becchia | Starring Ricky Lozano and Maia Nguyen | Photos by Rich Soublet
SOAPBOX
SOAPBOX is a horror comedy about horror movie critic Lawrence Chun, and his girlfriend Jenny Nguyen who come home to celebrate Lawrence’s father—Bread’s—Hwangap, or 60th birthday. When a plague breaks out in NYC and it is revealed his new stepmother—Jelly—is a scientologist, social distancing, masks, and Lawrence’s increasingly paranoid suspicions of the occult arise to make this quarantine Hwangap a scary movie of its own...
#SinceYallWantMeToBeWhite
Co-Written by Quentin Nguyen-duy and Serenity S’rae to be presented via Zoom for the Pao Arts Chinatown Festival, #SinceYallWantMeToBeWhite follows an African-American student, who, upon going viral for making a controversial Tik Tok about her school’s racism, is put in a mandatory EDI training Zoom room with her teacher—Ms. Lu.
Told through the contemporary mediums of Zoom and Tik Tok, this made for virtual presentation play dives into the heart of what got lost in translation between African and Asian-Americans during the 2020 lockdown.
