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[0:07] Gordon Cox: Welcome to Stagecraft, Variety's Theater Podcast, bringing you backstage and behind the scenes with the stars and creators of the hottest shows on Broadway, off Broadway, and beyond.

[0:17] Gordon Cox: I'm your host, Gordon Cox.

[0:19] Gordon Cox: On this episode of Stagecraft, I'm talking to the writer Qui Nguyen. Off-Broadway audiences will know him for plays including Viet Gone, seen at Manhattan Theater Club in 2016, and his upcoming production there, Poor Yellow Rednecks.

[0:31] Gordon Cox: But longtime New York Theater goers will know that his roots lie farther downtown with his award-winning Vampire Cowboys Theater Company, the creator of gleefully genre-bending geek-friendly theater like She Kills Monsters, Fight Girl Battle World, Alice in Slasherland, and The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G.

[0:49] Gordon Cox: The troupe has been mixing theater with geek culture long before Game of Thrones, Concrete HBO, Marvel reigned at the Box Office, or Harry Potter and the Cursed Child brought fantasy to Broadway.

[0:59] Gordon Cox: In news that might make the company's fans feel old, Vampire Cowboys marks its 20th anniversary this year, and to celebrate, the troupe is back with its latest production of a new play by Qui, Revenge Song, which started performances February 4th at the Geffen Playhouse in LA.

[1:15] Gordon Cox: Qui is in LA working on the show, but he's calling into the studio to talk with me about stage fights, Comic-Con, and Stealth Diversity. Hey Qui, thanks for joining me.

[1:25] Qui Nguyen: Um, so Vampire Cowboys is twenty years old?

[1:28] Qui Nguyen: How did that happen?

[1:30] Qui Nguyen: Uh, purely by accident.

[1:43] Qui Nguyen: And Robert is, for people who don't know, so um, is my uh, yeah, he's the director of all my plays. He's the co-artist and director of Vampire Cowboys, yeah.

[1:51] Gordon Cox: Right. Um, and was that realization part of what prompted uh the show you've got going on now?

[2:00] Qui Nguyen: Well no, like I, it kind of came about um, uh to be quite honest, and if any of the other theaters that have commissioned me are listening, they'll probably get mad. But uh basically I had a string of commissions uh from all these different theaters, and uh the Geffen was like, oh, uh, you know, I met Matt, and he was like, oh, what is the thing that you're most passionate about? What is the thing that you really, really want to do next?

[2:25] Qui Nguyen: And at that point I had done a show with Vampire Cowboys in like three or four years. It wasn't that long, but it was longer than usual considering we used to do a show per year every year.

[2:34] Qui Nguyen: Yeah, right. And I was just like, man, I would just like to be with my company again. I want to be with the artists that I've climbed the mountain with, the guys that have shaped me as an artist, those are the people I want to work with.

[2:47] Qui Nguyen: He's like, well, let's make it happen. And of course, like as soon as you do that, uh instead of having like just one or two people from a theater going checking in, going, oh, how's that commission going? How's that play going? I have an entire company and a director and my wife, who's our producer, just all on me going, hey, are you gonna make the thing in which we get to all hang out and make a show and party again?

[3:10] Qui Nguyen: And like, I guess I have to write it. So that's kind of what prompted me and pushed me. It's massive peer pressure.

[3:18] Gordon Cox: And for people who aren't maybe familiar with Vampire Cowboys shows, explain the aesthetic and sort of what the kind of theater you're making.

[3:29] Qui Nguyen: Um, on the surface, it's just like um, it's basically a big theater smorgasbord. Uh we do, you know, stage combat and puppetry and multimedia and uh all sorts of tricks, uh you know, extremely anachronistic and incongruent, uh purposely.

[3:47] Gordon Cox: Right.

[3:47] Qui Nguyen: Uh but the heartbeat of it all is, uh for me, uh when I started the company was to create superheroes for people who don't get to see themselves depicted that way uh regularly on screen or on stage.

[3:59] Qui Nguyen: And so, you know, like 20 years ago, we kind of hid the fact that we were a uh, a company of diversity. Uh we were, we, you know, we were like, oh, we're not gonna push that because I think as soon as we knew that, well, as soon as we pushed it, I think we were afraid that people would think we're medicine, you know, and no one wants medicine, right?

[4:21] Qui Nguyen: They're like, oh, they're trying to, you know, uh create, you know, things that fill, I don't know, uh all the baggage that people get when they think of theaters that that that's pro, that's mission is that. And so for us, I was like, well, then we'll make superheroes. That's gonna be the heartbeat of what uh we'll do.

[4:40] Qui Nguyen: Um, and they just won't know that all our superheroes are LGBTQIA, POC, and female. They just won't know that. That'll just be part of the mixture. But that was it. We were just making action adventure shows that kind of um challenged what you kind of thought a superhero should look like.

[4:59] Gordon Cox: Right, right. And what is the craziest thing that you had to figure out how to stage uh for this show that you're doing right now? Because I feel like in all your shows you're doing, there's always at least one sequence or multiple sequences where you have to slay a dragon or whatever, right?

[5:14] Qui Nguyen: We definitely decided that uh we were going to use the Marvel model of making this play happen. Uh uh, going, oh, in every MCU movie, uh, you have like basically the last 20 minutes is just in fight. It's a 20-minute giant action sequence.

[5:34] Qui Nguyen: And the advantage in film, uh, is you have camera angles and music swelling, and uh when things are exploding, strangely when people talk, you can still hear them. Uh in theater, you don't get the same uh flexibility.

[5:49] Qui Nguyen: So you have to find different ways of doing that, but it was definitely like, oh, how do we kind of create that same feel? How do we make that giant theatrical swell? Uh so for the last, so the challenge was for the last 20 minutes to like let the dialogue drop out and allow it to be a big MCU ending, you know.

[6:07] Gordon Cox: Right. And is there, I know there are puppets involved in the production, but are there, is there like, how did you achieve that last 20 minutes that you're talking about?

[6:16] Qui Nguyen: What were those? Uh well it, it's basically three giant sequences. So the first sequence is a live feed where uh we're putting a camera on stage and there's like basically a screen on top of the stage where you get to see what's in the lens, and that's what you are prepared.

[6:34] Qui Nguyen: That's what you're supposed to see, what's inside the lens. But on stage, we're using a lot of puppetry and miniatures and basically moving cardboard pieces to create shots that are like big action sequences of a woman uh basically fighting things and sneaking into a big, uh, you know, uh maximum security type of building.

[6:56] Qui Nguyen: Uh it's really fun. Uh, because you know, it's like things like you, you know, you can turn the camera sideways and she can like climb up the wall, like on the ground. It looks like she's climbing up a wall.

[7:05] Gordon Cox: Yeah.

[7:06] Qui Nguyen: It's like that. Yeah. So we're doing those tricks, and then that slides into what I call it like the big traditional fight. Like it's a big, you know, we have like uh this incredible, one of our actors is an incredible like acrobat fighter.

[7:18] Qui Nguyen: And so we kind of like center a huge, like what we can our Zark our Darth Vader fight there. And then we have like once we get done with that giant fight movement, then we move into like a giant theatrical fight movement where I'm doing a big trick there.

[7:34] Gordon Cox: So um, we haven't talked yet about uh what the show's about. I've read it, but um obviously haven't had a chance to see it yet because it's not up yet. So um, tell us about what it's about and what inspired it.

[7:46] Qui Nguyen: Uh, it's about uh a real life person uh named Julie d'Aubigny. Uh she was a 17th century uh queer sword fighter, duelist, slash opera singer.

[7:57] Gordon Cox: How did you find out about her?

[7:59] Qui Nguyen: She, well, Vampire Cowboys for the longest time I refused to do anything based on anything. Like I, we did everything. And usually basically when we were just a company that did a show every year, we would as soon as the show closed in the spring, I would then like send out the social media to our fans, like what should we do next?

[8:26] Qui Nguyen: And they would tell us like, oh, you should make a sci-fi show, or you should make a Kung Fu show or whatever. And that would be kind of like whatever was the biggest swell would be the next thing.

[8:35] Qui Nguyen: And the one thing that kept popping up in my feed from like people who followed our company was Julie d'Aubigny. It was the constant like you should do a show about her, you should do a show about her, you should do a show about her, because she's a big kind of, you know, we have a lot of queer fans and we have a lot of fight nerd fans, and it was kind of like the perfect like, you know, Venn diagram moment of like these are two things that, uh, this is the one thing that both corners really liked, but I was very much like I don't do, I don't tell other people's stories.

[9:05] Qui Nguyen: And then I did a play called Viet Gone, which was about my mom and dad, right? And so I told someone else's story, told my parents' story, and I employed all my Vampire Cowboys techniques on it, and it's done very well.

[9:18] Qui Nguyen: And I then thought, well, if I'm going to do that with my parents' story, what would happen if I did it with a story that wasn't someone I was related to? Could it be equally successful?

[9:30] Qui Nguyen: Um, and so when Matt brought up the idea of commissioning me for the Geffen, I was like, oh, this seems like the right, you know, the prime time to do that, the time to try to try to push what I do as an artist.

[9:43] Qui Nguyen: Uh, and so I was like, oh, it's time to do this a play about this person that has been in my face for, you know, for 20 years, apparently. And so I finally read up on her and I was like, holy crap, she has a very interesting life.

[9:58] Qui Nguyen: Like the when people see the show, I think the craziest shit that's on that stage is gonna be the things they assume are the stuff we made up when that is not what we made up.

[10:07] Qui Nguyen: Like all we did was make superhero fights, and we made them her speak like someone from 2020. But basically, the story of her, you know, you know, falling in love and, you know, grave robbing and burning down churches and uh beating up, you know, opera singers and uh running away from the law and stuff like that.

[10:28] Qui Nguyen: That's, that was all her. And what I find interesting about her is unlike, you know, most people you read about from that era, there's no real, in all honesty, there's nothing really important about her, you know, on the surface.

[10:43] Qui Nguyen: She's not, you know, she's not a noble or royal, she wasn't in the politics, she wasn't part of a war. The only reason why we know about her is because she broke a lot of rules.

[10:52] Qui Nguyen: You know, she broke what expectations of what people expected from a woman at that time. Uh and that's what I found fascinating about her.

[11:01] Qui Nguyen: She was special because she was a rule breaker. And that felt very, that was something that I felt a kindred spirit to.

[11:07] Qui Nguyen: My company felt a kindred spirit too. Uh, and it was definitely immediately like, oh, this is a story we have to tell.

[11:13] Gordon Cox: Do you have a sense of why in particular the story resonates right now as opposed to if you'd done this 10 years ago? Like what do you feel like her story is really speaking to right now for us?

[11:25] Qui Nguyen: I mean, I to be honest, I don't really consider that type of stuff, like how the stories I'm telling matter in the moment, because I guess I'm like a lot of writers who go, oh, hopefully it's a timeless story. Uh, but I mean it is a story about identity, it's about gender politics, uh, it's about, you know, about the difference between like gender queer, like you know, gender identity versus sexual identity, things like that I think are part obviously part of the conversation uh right now. Uh but I mean ultimately it's just a fun story about hopefully as we depict it correctly, a story that adds yet another uh queer superhero to the world, you know.

[12:08] Gordon Cox: You mentioned Viet Cong, and you've got what is what I understand to be the second play in that trilogy, right? Also based on your sort of family history, Poor Yellow coming up.

[12:17] Qui Nguyen: Yeah, that's at MTC this uh the May at the end of the year.

[12:21] Gordon Cox: Right, exactly.

[12:22] Qui Nguyen: When Viet Cong first came out, and I people like me who had sort of known all your Vampire Cowboys work, it seemed um a little more reserved and a little more uptown off Broadway as opposed to downtown. Did were people worried that you turned respectable?

[12:38] Qui Nguyen: Uh, I well I was afraid I turned respectable. The funny thing, I always refer to Viet Cong as Vampire Cowboys Light. Uh oh, it's like the store starter of hors d'oeuvre to really who I am as an artist. Because it's like it's all the stuff that I do, but it's you know, it doesn't I I I you know it's definitely pulled back. Uh whereas uh whereas uh Julia's full on Vampire Cowboys, which I'm I'm having a lot of fun seeing and watching people put together. Um but for that story it was really like you know like the when I wrote it, I actually wrote it for Vampire Cowboys. Like South Coast Rep commissioned it, and uh it was a story that I had always wanted to tell, a story about my parents, and I always thought that I would have to grow super old and you know, become like a totally different writer to be able to write.

I'm like when I when I become a respectable writer, then I'll write it and I will understand how to tell this story properly. And as my parents got older and I had kids, I I I very much sat down and said I'm I am just the writer I am. So let me just write this the way I know how to write it, so thus no one will want to produce it except for my kids. And so uh that's what I'll do. I'll just write a play for my company using the money that and I was actually surprised that they wanted to do it after you know it was done because it it it it still, though I think it's Vampire Cowboys Light, it still seems to be because of the language and the way it's done, often the thing that's a sore thumb out of most people's programs, you know.

[14:26] Gordon Cox: I'll have more with Qui right after the break.

[14:35] Gordon Cox: Now here's more from Vampire Cowboys, Qui Nguyen. You mentioned earlier you were talking about um the fans that you would talk to to help sort of guide where the company went um went next. Where how did you when did you start to accumulate those fans and how did you then go about kind of nourishing them and kind of keeping that fan base, sustaining that fan base?

[14:56] Qui Nguyen: Definitely from uh solely for I always credit my my wife at that time was just my producer uh and my girlfriend at that time, like of Vampire Cowboys, Abby Marcus, because when we started Robert and myself, we found her by accident because we produced our very, very first show 20 years ago called St. Glass Ugly at this theater festival of the Manhattan Theat uh middle.

[15:20] Gordon Cox: Oh, the mid-Manhattan Theater Festival, yeah.

[15:23] Qui Nguyen: That was our first thing. And it was uh we put it together, it was the first thing we had done out of grad school.

[15:30] Gordon Cox: Wh which was where? Grad school?

[15:32] Qui Nguyen: Which was Ohio University, right is where we went.

[15:34] Gordon Cox: Yep.

[15:35] Qui Nguyen: And uh and we produced the show, we thought it was pretty good, and we had zero audience members because the one element that we forgot to do was advertise or tell anyone about the show because the last show we had done was in grad school where students just showed up. You know, you do a show, people showed up, and we didn't know we had to actually tell people. And the only reason why Abby showed up was because I rented a rehearsal hall from her. I thought she was cute, and uh then I bumped into her down the street from where I live, which was complete happenstance. It's like, hey, do you want to see my show? She's like, Oh, you do theater? Yeah, I would love to see it. And then she came to see it, and it was her and uh reviewer Martin Denton that were the only people in the theater.

[16:15] Gordon Cox: Right.

[16:16] Qui Nguyen: And she she afterwards she was like, Hey, you're actually a really interesting artist. You're a shitty producer. Uh, but that's what I'm starting to do at school, so I would love to take it over and and and figure out a way to get you an audience. And I was like, uh, okay, you know, young cute girl that I just met. What like what do you know about theater? And she knew a lot. Uh, and and and the thing that she did was she sat us down and and asked uh us like what kind of art we wanted to make, uh, with a company called Vampire Cowboys. And I told her all about it, and she was like, Oh, you're like geeks. I was like, hmm, that's not a nice thing to call me. Like for that was a term of endearment, uh, you know, and uh and she's like, No, but technically that's what you do, the things you want to do.

You're kind of a geek theater company, that's what we'll call you. And I was like, You can't call us a geek theater company because people will confuse it for Greek, and we're not Greek. Like, like, people are gonna know it's geek, okay? Like, I'm good at what I do, just showed up and listen to me. And then the next thing that she did was she's like, Well, doing what you want to do, you're never gonna compete. Like, you know, she gave me this like weird because she's like a theater person who likes statistics, and she's like, Here's a statistic chart. Like, you know, if a regular theater person sees eight shows a year. They tend to be like, you know, a person who has like a subscribe a subscription and you know, blah blah blah, and so they'll they'll have like six shows already reserved, and then the half of it, they have one other show per week that they'll or per month they'll they're willing to see.

Are they really going to see you versus something at like Lincoln Center? And like, okay, so that's gonna be weird. And her theory was somewhere else. And so there was a startup, which sounds silly now, New York Comic Con that was horizon.

[18:01] Qui Nguyen: I've heard of it.

[18:02] Gordon Cox: Yeah.

[18:03] Qui Nguyen: At that time, it was very, very small. It was year one of it, and she was like, What I would like to do is I would like to spend my own money and make put a Vampire Cowboys booth there, and that's where we're gonna find our fans. I was like, that sounds crazy. Oh, because it was 2,000 bucks to do it.

[18:17] Gordon Cox: Right.

[18:17] Qui Nguyen: Uh so she got a booth there, and that same year, uh, she was like, she looked over and there's this little stage there that was completely empty. And so she just went up to the organizer because it was small. I was like, Hey, what's that stage for? I was like, Well, you know, that's for like our speakers and things. We don't have a lot of them because we're very new. She's like, Well, um, so that's perform on. And they're like, Yeah, absolutely. And so she called me up and was like, Hey, call up all our actors' friends, we're gonna put them in cute like Hollywood adventure costumes, choreographed bites. We're just like people to look at us. And so that's what we did, and that kind of drew in our first like group of fans who kind of came up and were like, What are you?

We're a theater company, they came to see our first show. And geeks, unlike uh like a regular theater, you know, person, I would say, um, has two two things that they do. One, because they come from a cinema culture. The most important time to see a show isn't later in the run, it's to see the very first run. So we ended up selling out previews, or we sold out right away because geeks see it at top, and then once they realize theater, unlike film, there is no second, you know, that you can't buy it on DVD. The only way to obtain the thing that you want is to see it again and again. So then when they realized that we had we were a thing, they would come and see that first show, the very first performance, and then buy tickets for every following weekend.

So bring their friends and things like that. So we would sell out literally in a day or two for our entire runs. And we just did that for years and years, and you just collect a lot of fans, they brought more people, we were in bigger theaters, uh, we had longer runs, and you just accumulate like and in terms of what I do now in comparison to that, it's still very modest. Like we have a couple of thousand fans, I would say, but uh, but that was enough to sustain a company for you know, for when we were in New York 15 years without really having to pin on a lot of other money, you know.

[20:13] Gordon Cox: Yeah. And you are based in LA now. I'm talking to you in LA.

[20:15] Qui Nguyen: Yeah, and so and when did you when did you move there and what sort of prompted that move? And how did you're thinking about uh Vampire Cowboys and its activities sort of figure into all of that?

[20:27] Qui Nguyen: Uh well, I mean, like I I moved out here for kind of the reasons that a lot of people moved out out of here. It was uh I I have kids, um, and I wanted to see if maybe TV film was a more natural fit to my writing style. Did it feel like the rise of kind of geek culture over the years of Vampire Cowboys that we were talking about that that it might seem Hollywood would be a little more receptive to the kind of stuff that you write?

[20:54] Qui Nguyen: The first time I was I ever even looked at TV was um around I think I guess it was like 11 years ago when I first was like I got interested in the notion of coming out here, and at that time, Scott Pilgrim was out, and I thought, oh, this is a good sign. I write very much like Edgar Wright. That's a very style I really really enjoy. But Scott Pilgrim bombed.

[21:16] Gordon Cox: It sure did.

[21:18] Qui Nguyen: And at that same summer, uh that that movie with Sylvester Stallone and all the old action heroes exploded. And basically, and this is before you know streaming. So basically everyone pulled back from doing really high concept shows. And as soon as I got out here, everyone was like, Oh, do you have like a low concept idea? I was like, what's a low concept? I was like, you know, like two stop boys hanging out in the back of a Walmart. And that's like the premise of the show. It's like I don't write that. And so I immediately ran away from uh from the West Coast because it's like, oh, I don't write that way. I'm not gonna ever write you everyone loves Raymond or uh Friends. That's just not how I'm built.

I'm funny, but that's not what I'm interested in. And then of course, like we as we all saw what happened to television, it became a different medium. It became a much bigger thing. Uh uh serialized stories are now the thing that's the that I think that's why I think playwrights do so well. We we tend to think of character-driven stories, and we love telling stories, like given the opportunity uh for the 22 episodes is always fun or 10 episodes or whatever.

[22:23] Qui Nguyen: Um, and so it just it became a thing that just fit me. Like at some point, you know, what Hollywood wanted and what I was interested in just merged naturally, and my manager very much was like, Oh, this is your time. This is the moment to come out here and give it a try.

[22:37] Gordon Cox: And what do you, you mentioned you're working on another project at the same time as Revenge Song in LA? Tell us about it.

[22:44] Qui Nguyen: Uh, I can't. Alas. I guess I work for the Walt Disney Animation Company, and um it's coming out in the future, but nearish future, and it's maybe I'll be able to talk about it soon, but not right now.

[23:00] Gordon Cox: And you have also worked on the show The Society at Netflix, yeah.

[23:03] Qui Nguyen: Uh, Society, yeah, yeah.

[23:10] Gordon Cox: Excuse me. Um, is there a season two of Society coming?

[23:15] Qui Nguyen: Yeah, there's a season two, and that should be out. I think they start filming this spring, and so it should be out maybe summer or fall soon. It's an incredible cast, and the team of writers on it are some of the best writers I've ever gotten to work with. They're incredible, they're an incredible team.

[23:33] Gordon Cox: What has your work in other genres allowed you to do in other media that you haven't been able to do on stage?

[23:43] Qui Nguyen: Um, I not that I ever listened to artistic directors before, but I think that because I don't—I’ll be frank about it—because I don't make my money doing theater anymore, it allows me to have the freedom to kind of be really true to who I am as an artist. Like I don't feel like, oh, if you don't want to do it, my life's over. I'm like, if you don't want to do my show, you don't have to do my show. I'll do it somewhere else. If you want it to be something else, I don't really need to change it because you can just not do it. And so I think it's put me on like an even playing ground where I think before I would have been more open to it, not necessarily because I agreed with that input that I didn't agree with, but because I wanted to keep being paid, you know?

And now because that element isn't there, it's allowed me to really—and it's not that I'm not collaborative, I'm usually collaborative, but if it's a note I disagree with, I'm not shy to go, yeah, I'm just not gonna do that. Or I'll give you the reason why, but I'm not shy about what I think is important to the work that I'm doing, you know.

[24:58] Gordon Cox: Right. And what is it you've sort of answered this tangentially already, but what is it that stage allows you to do that you find yourself unable to do in film and TV?

[25:09] Qui Nguyen: Oh well, I mean, like, uh, you know, it's the stage is still really immediate for me, right? Unlike film and TV, which what I love about that is the reach that I get. I'm like, oh, just the amount of people who get to see my work do that is satisfying, but it is through the filter of producers and studios and things like that. Whereas theater, it's still me. It's still pure. It's still way closer to what I envisioned. Um, there's immediacy to it. I'm also allowed to be a lot more mischievous. I can swear a lot more, I don't have to worry about like if you swear that much, we're suddenly PG-13 or R. Like I don't have to worry about any of those things. I get to—I always go like the budget in a film to be good is in dollars, right?

Like if I'm doing a big sci-fi movie, a big superhero flick, it kind of does require 200 million dollars to be made. Otherwise, it just looks cheap and it doesn't feel good. Whereas I would say the medium theater is the imagination. So I don't necessarily—like Vampire Cowboys was doing these big shows on like a shoestring budget, you know, and people loved it and had just as much fun, and that's because I was, you know, I was dealing with like, oh, their brains could fill in the blanks that I couldn't with my money. And so it's fun. Like, I mean, I think at the Geffen we have a little bit more money, but I think we're trying to stick to doing a lot of stage tricks that still require the audience to fill in the blank in a fun way, just like the new musical SpongeBob SquarePants did a similar trick where it could have come out in like big cartoony costumes, they still used a lot of stage craft and a lot of theatrics, which made it super enjoyable. It surprised me.

[27:02] Gordon Cox: So, and do you imagine bringing Revenge Song to New York sometimes?

[27:08] Qui Nguyen: Well, that's the goal. That's the goal. Like, we haven't had a chance to talk to a lot of people yet because of my schedule, but I definitely think that, you know, Abby being our very good producer is already in conversations, but you know, I would love to have those conversations. I just I'm not able to right now.

[27:28] Gordon Cox: Yeah. Do you think if you were looking at how what the theater industry is sort of like right now, do you feel like it would be harder or easier to start Vampire Cowboys now than it was 20 years ago?

[27:42] Qui Nguyen: Who, I mean, uh, it's things are so much more expensive now, to be quite honest. Like I think about the spaces available in downtown New York, I think about like the rehearsal spaces that like the reason I always, you know, it was important to us that like when we were in New York, a huge reason why we were able to just be able to develop was the fact that we found really, really cheap but good rehearsal spaces that were big enough to accommodate big fight shows. Because you can't go into a small room if you're going to swing swords around or swing a battle axe around. You need a really big space. And at that time there was a space called Studio 11. That was this huge space that was only $10 an hour.

And then when we took it over as Vampire Cowboys, we kept it $10 an hour because we knew it was very, very important to allow artists to have a place to incubate their ideas in a large arena for very little money. I don't know the spaces that exist there. Like just the times when we would do shows post getting up studio. It was like, oh, this is a space we have, there's not very much room, and we're paying a lot more money for it. And that seems like a small problem. This is a small one. Then we just talk about, you know, theater spaces to rent from. Not that we wouldn't have found a way to do it if we were to have started today, but I think it would have been a little more complex. The one good and bad too about when we came out, social media was still very new.

And so when we were using platforms like MySpace and Facebook and Friendster to advertise our shows, there wasn't a lot of competition for eyeballs. And now like social media is such a thing that like you mean me posting about my show disappears like instantaneously. It's almost as if I didn't need to, you know, why bother doing it at all? And so it's just like, oh, it's the tricks that we had to get attention to get eyeballs on it is different then than now. Blog culture was still a big thing in theater then. People read a lot of blogs, everyone's in podcasts now. I have no idea how to do that. So we would have found a way, we would have just been a company that started and using the tools of 2020. But you know, I will say the tools of 2000, 2001 were a lot easier to figure out for my old brain.

[30:11] Gordon Cox: And so when a young writer asks you for advice as they're just starting out, what do you tell them? What's the thing that you feel like is really important as you're a young artist starting to make your way?

[30:23] Qui Nguyen: Yeah, I always try—I say this over and over again anytime I talk to a young writer, write the thing that you want to see. And when I say that, I don't mean the thing you just want to see because you want a job. I mean the thing that you want to see and you're going to see for at least 80 times in a row. You know, because that's you're gonna be in rehearsal every day. You're gonna see it a whole bunch. You want a second production, you're gonna see it again, and so you're gonna see it a lot. And if it's if you're doing it because it's something you think a theater wants to do, or it feels like the right story to be told at this, never going to be a thing because you're never going to invest it the same way as a thing that you actually as a fan want to see.

You know, you're making a thing, you're like, oh, there's something in my mind that doesn't exist in any medium, and that's a story I just, you know, like we're doing like a punk rock 17th century, you know, superhero show about Julie d'Aubigny. It doesn't exist. There's nowhere else that exists this version of this thing. And for me it was very, very important to see this version of this story. And that's why I would invest all this time into writing it to making it. And I think that that's important that young artists, because I think they sometimes forget that part. They write what's important to them. Absolutely. They write the story. They spend a lot of time trying to figure out the story.

But they can only—they can tell, which is very, very crucial. I think that's the heartbeat of telling any good story from anybody. But then they forget about the entertainment. The one where they're like, oh, am I really gonna watch this every night and giggle and have a smile on the face and cry at the point where I need to cry? They sometimes forget that. I think that that's the other missing ingredient. That's the ingredient that actually honestly just sells to any company because that's the passion that allows you to pitch it.

[32:17] Gordon Cox: Yeah, yeah. I think that's a great place to wrap up, actually. Thanks, Qui. Thanks for joining me. Nice to talk to you.

[32:24] Gordon Cox: That was Qui Nguyen, the co-artistic director and co-founder of Vampire Cowboys Theater Company, and the writer of Revenge Song, now playing at the Geffen Playhouse in LA. In New York, he's got Poor Yellow Rednecks coming to MTC's off-Broadway space later in the spring. If you like what you're hearing on this and other episodes of Stagecraft, please take a moment to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and you can subscribe there or on Spotify or on the Broadway Podcast Network or anywhere else that finer podcasts are dispensed. If you've got feedback, you can find me on Twitter at G Cox Variety. Next week, I'm talking to Ruth Negga, the Oscar-nominated actress currently reprising her acclaimed performance as Hamlet at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn. Until then, see you at the theater.