Vietgone Scribe Qui Nguyen on Why His Plays Include Kung Fu Fighting, What He Geeks Out Over & What Inspired His New Play

Qui Nguyen is a playwright, screenwriter, fight choreographer, co-founder of the theater company Vampire Cowboys and self-professed geek. A Los Angeles-based writer for Marvel Studios, Nguyen won a Daytime Emmy Award for his work on the animated pre-school program Peg+Cat and has a slew of accolades and awards for his writing. His works for the stage include She Kills Monsters, Soul Samurai, The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G., Alice in Slasherland, Fight Girl Battle World, Men of Steel and Living Dead in Denmark. His play Vietgone is currently being produced by Manhattan Theatre Club and will run at City Center through December 4. Nguyen took time out of his busy schedule to hang out with Broadway.com at New Dramatists, which he considers his home away from home.

Was there a specific incident that inspired Vietgone?
I've always wanted to write a play about my parents. It took a while to do it, though. I went to The University of California, Irvine to do some research on Vietnamese refugees. They had these files of pictures from different refugee camps, and I saw one of those files was for Fort Chaffee, where my parents were. I just got obsessed with looking through that file in hopes I would see a picture of them somewhere. I didn't, but that's what made me decide to write about it. I was obsessed with that thought: Who were they in 1975 when they were new in America?  

What percentage of this play really happened?
I can't give you a percentage, but I can tell you most of the events are real. Like how they escaped Vietnam, my dad did have a wife and two kids, my mom had a boyfriend—all those things were real. They don't speak like 2016 teenagers, and they also don't rap, so that's totally fake. It's my parents love story, which is about two refugees who lost their families and loved ones in Vietnam and how they had to rebuild their lives in a refugee camp in Fort Chaffee, Arkansas in 1975. 

Which writers have inspired you?

What time of day do you get your best work done?
The morning. It's shifted throughout my life. When I was in my 20s, I was a night owl. I wrote from like midnight to five in the morning. Now that I have kids that seems stupid, so I write during the day. I have a day job where I write, so it's definitely as soon as I get my first cup of coffee in me. I'm good to go from nine to at least one. At that point, I start to edit. My creative brain starts to go away and then my editorial brain starts to show up.

What's the first thing you do when you sit down to write? 
If it's a piece that is in progress, I tend to look over what I've written already to get the momentum of where I was going to go next. If it's a brand new piece and I haven't written anything, then I go to my white board. I actually pull out my dry-erase marker and kernel. I write images and ideas and create graphs; I'm a very visual writer. I like to know the world—who's related to who—stuff that may not ever show up in the play or the screenplay. I like to have it all mapped out in a nice visual way because then I can look up at that board anytime I get lost. I'm definitely a person who like finds newspaper clippings or pictures and pin them onto my cork board. I look at those and get inspired. I'm a really regimented writer. I outline everything from top to bottom. I do all my beats and stuff like that. I've always thought of my plays as Hollywood popcorn movies. If you ever watch one of my plays, you can almost take out a clock and every seven minutes some big theatrical event will happen. Vietgone's a prime example of it—seven minutes, a musical piece; seven minutes, a kung fu fight; seven minutes, a big movement sequence. I think of those big movie places, and how to get to them. 

What do you geek out over? 
I geek out over a lot. I am, after all, a self-professed geek. I'm a big cinephile: I love old flicks. I’m also a big comic book fan. I also just geek out over fellow writers; I love all the writers I've become friends with throughout the years through New Dramatist and May-Yi Theater Company.I just love seeing their work, and I'm more inspired by living playwrights than by dead ones. I love seeing what my peers are doing and watching their work. I've never felt like I was a theater geek—my wife can tell you all about the history of Broadway and her favorite musicals; I couldn't tell you any of that stuff, but I can tell you what all our friends are doing and how they've evolved and what I can steal and use in my own work and things like that. That's what I really geek out over, the craft of writing.

What play changed your life?

What obsesses you as a writer?
It feels like the themes have changed throughout the years, I think right now because of the political climate that we're in, I really want to show the humanity behind people who end up becoming political tropes. The Vietnamese are definitely a political trope—a prop for speeches and things. I always want to find the humanity in that. Right now, it's Syria and the Middle East. These are people with loves, passions, desires. They're not just an easy carbon copy picture that politicians want to put out there to win an argument. 

How does being a fight choreographer inform your work as a writer? 
I think that's why I think of my play in set pieces—that's how it all started. Because I'm such a fan of kung fu movies , and [in them] fights happen every few minutes. You watch kung fu movies to watch people fight and not for the intricate plots. I try to I keep that momentum and excitement—to get the audience pumped up watching my plays and to always have that kind of visceral connection. It also just allowed me to do the fights I've always wanted to see on stage. When you're being hired to do fights for theater, it's Shakespeare most of the time or very realistic—like the people get slapped or pushed off a couch or something. You rarely get to use crazy Eastern swords and weapons. You don't just see that in the middle of a Sam Shepard play. 

What's the hard work of being a playwright no one ever told you? 
Time management. I think I was prepped for all the romanticism of being a playwright, including being a starving artist. I was prepped for staying up late, getting rejected,doing readings, grubby bars—all those things. I was excited for all of that. What I was not prepped for was the time management. As my career's progressed, I'm getting pulled in five different directions and yet I also need to be home because I have a family and kids. To be able to make time for all of those things is the hardest thing for me. I feel like it's heartbreaking on every level. I want to be here in New York working on my play, but I also want to be in L.A. working on the TV shows or movies I'm working on, and I also just want to be home to play with my kids on the weekend. Since I'm flung all over the place, I never get to dive into any one thing anymore. That's something I didn't expect to see in my career, and it's probably the hardest thing. I've missed a lot of birthdays and weddings and funerals because of it. I miss some important events.

What's your best piece of advice for aspiring playwrights?
Be you. That's as short as I can get it: Be you. 

What's your favorite line in Vietgone?