HERE COMES JOHNNY YEN AGAIN
Written and Performed by Alvin Eng, in collaboration with Director/Dramaturg, Wendy Wasdahl
HERE COMES JOHNNY YEN AGAIN (or How I Kicked Punk) is an acoustic punk rock raconteur work in development. This worl explores the impact of opium and The Opium Wars on the Chinese Diaspora as well as NYC’s punk/counterculture through the dual prisms of William S. Burroughs’ character, “Johnny Yen”––immortalized in Iggy Pop & David Bowie’s ”Lust For Life”––and my own Grandfather’s opium overdose on the streets of NYCs Chinatown.
Please click here to see a work-in-progress performance of this work.
Chinatown Arts Week 2021, presented by Think!Chinatown, NYC with Special Guest, Geoff Lee (RIP)
Dixon Place Workshop Residency, NYC, Feb. 8, March 7, April 18 cancelled due to Covid shutdown
Shoes Off, Mouth Off Asian American Storytelling Thing, Under St. Marks Theatre, Caveat Cabaret, NYC, 2020
Moving Body Resources Salon, NYC, 2019
HISTORY, NOT NOSTALGIA,
CROSSROADS, 2021: For JAMES BALDWIN
In 2021, National Sawdust commissioned this Essay, Spoken Word Video and Playlist project for their Fire This Time Virtual Festival honoring James Baldwin.
HISTORY, NOT NOSTALGIA: CROSSROADS 2021, for JAMES BALDWIN, an essay, spoken word video, and Baldwin-inspired playlist––all created at the invitation of the Brooklyn-based music/arts venue, National Sawdust, for their website. The five-minute video was shot on location at City Hall Park, NYC. The current Public Art Fund installation of sculptures by Melvin Edwards seemed the ideal visual counterpoint to contemplate the impact of the great James Baldwin’s words on this unique moment in American and world history.
Click for National Sawdust page
Click for Spoken Word Video only
CHI CAN’T BREATHE: For GEORGE FLOYD
During the world-changing Summer of 2020, I was commissioned by the Reset Theatre Coalition (RTC) to write and perform a dramatic/spoken word piece, CHI CAN’T BREATHE: For George Floyd. The piece was also published in the anthology, We’re Not Neutral – Reset Series 2020 Collected Short Plays––a call to action for all theatre artists and readers driven by a desire to effect social change in America. Sparked by the profound social unrest and uncertainty that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, this collection of original plays challenges the reader to reflect on the potential of language and performance to reach deep into the hearts and minds of all members of society and shift centuries-old misconceptions and prejudices.
For the We’re Not Neutral book launch in April 2021, I performed the piece as part of RTC’s Playwrights Keeping Vigil virtual performance. That spoken word performance video can be viewed here.
THE LAST EMPEROR of FLUSHING
Written and Performed by Alvin Eng, in collaboration with Director/Dramaturg, Wendy Wasdahl
This memoir monologue humorously recalls Alvin’s odd odyssey of growing up in one of the few Chinese families in Flushing in the 1970s––that ran a Hand Laundry on Union St, no less!––to later becoming one of its few citizens who could not speak fluent Chinese as Flushing became NYC’s second Chinatown.
Chinatown Arts Week, Chen Dance Center @ 70 Mulberry Street, Chinatown, NYC, 2019
Stoop Storytelling Series, Baltimore, MD, 2015
Xiazhou People’s Hall, presented by U.S. Consulate, Guangzhou, China, 2011
New York Asian Cultural Festival, Queens Theatre in The Park, Flushing, NYC, 2005
Dixon Place, NYC, 2006
Urban Stages, NYC, 2006
Pan Asian Repertory Theatre Two-Night Only Solo Performance Series, NYC, 2005
OUR LAUNDRY, OUR TOWN: Memoir-in-Progress Readings
These readings picked up the thread of The Last Emperor of Flushing––recounting the even odder but rewarding journey of Alvin’s being invited by the U.S. Consulate, Guangzhou, to perform his memoir monologue in his family’s ancestral Guangdong Province…in English. The invitation grew out of co-conceiving and directing a Fulbright Specialist Devised Theatre residency at City University of Hong Kong. There, the students wrote and performed English language plays in response to Thornton Wilder’s classic Americana play, Our Town. As Wilder spent part of his childhood in China when his father was U.S. Consul General to Hong Kong and Shanghai, Our Town has many Chinese influences.
Museum of Chinese in America’s NüVoices of the Diaspora: An Evening of Storytelling, NYC, 2019
CUNY Asian American/Asian Research Institute, Auto-Ethnography for Stage and Page, NYC, 2017
Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Queens College, Flushing, NYC, 2016
City Lore Gallery, NYC, 2015
Baltimore Museum of Art, Asian Cultural Festival, Baltimore, MD. 2015
THE FLUSHING CYCLE
Queens Theatre in The Park, NYC, 2000
MORE STORIES FROM THE PAGAN PAGODA
La Mama, E.T.C., NYC, 1992,
Performance Space 122, NYC, 1991
OVER THE COUNTER CULTURE
Franklin Furnace “In Exile” at Judson Memorial Church, NYC, 1991
alvineng.com 