Playwright Performer Memoirist Educator
2020 NEWS & EVENTS
DIXON PLACE Presents 2020 Workshop Residency
HERE COMES JOHNNY YEN AGAIN (or How I Kicked Punk)
Dixon Place Presents a Three-Performance Workshop Residency a new solo work Written and Performed by Alvin Eng
Direction and Dramaturgy by Wendy Wasdahl
Merging spoken word and acoustic punk rock raconteur styles, Alvin Eng’s ‘HERE COMES JOHNNY YEN AGAIN (or How I Kicked Punk)’ explores the impact of opium on the Chinese Diaspora as well as NYC’s punk/counterculture world through the dual prisms of William S. Burroughs’ character, “Johnny Yen”––immortalized in Iggy Pop and David Bowie’s song, ”Lust For Life”––and his own Grandfather’s opium overdose on the streets of NYC’s Chinatown.
(Card design by Ivy Arce, photo by Jim Goodin)
Acoustic Punk Rock Raconteur Saturday Nights @ 7:30pm -Free Admisssion
February 8, March 7, April 18, 2020
The Lounge at Dixon Place, 161-A Chrystie Street, New York City
(btw. Rivington & Delancey Streets) / 212.219.0736 / dixonplace.org
Fall 2019 Events follow… (full new website soon!)
THREE TREES A Staged Reading and Workshop
OCTOBER 7, OTTERBEIN UNIVERSITY, Westerville, Ohio
Otterbein University Department of Theatre & Dance will present a staged reading and host workshops around THREE TREES, a play that explores the complex relationship between philosopher Isaku Yanaihara and sculptor Alberto Giacometti. THREE TREES is the first work of Alvin Eng’s Portrait Plays, a cycle of historical dramas that examines the parallels between portraiture, history and power as manifested in the convergence of different disciplines, eras and cultures. This play was presented Off-Broadway with the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre in NYC, as well as in staged readings with Baltimore Center Stage and The Moving Parts Theatre in Paris. https://www.otterbein.edu/theatre-performances/
THE MOURNING AFTER: A Play Reading and Discussion
City University of New York, Borough of Manhattan Community College
Tuesday, September 10, 7-8:30pm
On the Eve of the 18th Anniversary of 9/11, the BMCC Theatre Department presents The Mourning After, a one-act play written and directed by Professor Alvin Eng featuring Dominick Allen and Simone Zalusky. After the play reading, there will be a discussion and open mic: 9/11 themed poems and reflections of 2–3 minutes in length are welcomed!
The Mourning After was written on 9/11/03 aboard the A train as part of the “A Train Plays” 24-hour play festival. The play explores the then two-year aftermath of 9/11 through the prisms of class and perception as two strangers meet aboard a Queens-bound A-train. How far have we come as a country since then? Where do we need to go from here? RSVP to Facebook Event Page
Coming Soon:
THE LAST EMPEROR of FLUSHING: Our Laundry, Our Town, a memoir travelogue through Chinese America. The story begins growing up in a 1970s Chinese Hand Laundry in what was then one of the few immigrant Asian families in Flushing, Queens, to performing his one-man show, “The Last Emperor of Flushing,” in English in a former People’s Hall of the Cultural Revolution in his family’s ancestral Guangdong province.
