We recently connected with Maddie Nguyen and have shared our conversation below.

Maddie, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

The most meaningful project I’ve worked on thus far has been a play I wrote back in late 2019/early 2020. It’s gone through many iterations and titles, but right now it’s simply called “the moon play”. It’s currently in rehearsals for a fully-staged production that will go up on July 13th and 16th at the Zephyr Theatre as part of the SheLA Summer Theatre Festival.

“the moon play” is probably the most personal work I’ve ever written. It centers on a young woman named June Tran who, when faced with the disintegration of her personal relationships, decides to forgo the idea of human connection entirely and fly herself the Moon, where she’ll live the rest of her days out in solitude. This becomes a problem when she starts receiving messages from the NASA worker known only as “Houston”, who is assigned to talk her down.

The character of June was actually conceived back in college, as part of a screenplay I wrote for a class sophomore year. It was a very different story, focusing it on June as a high school student who found it difficult to connect with other people, and choosing to build a telescope with her childhood best friend and the new girl who transferred to their school. Back then, I considered relationships with new, unfamiliar people to be incredibly difficult, and a lot of June’s thoughts and actions reflected that.

After a few years passed and I realized that I /was/ actually capable of connecting with other people and making friends, I then had to deal with the other side of it – the fact that after four years, the people I had come to know and love would be leaving, or moving away, or taking grownup jobs, and things would never be the same as they were when we were all students.

This isn’t a new discovery for anyone – it’s a topic that’s been dissected over and over. It’s very Jo March, “why is everyone getting married and leaving me when we could be young and interesting forever” type of thinking. I remember it was also very painful. I’d had such a hard time making these connections in the first place, and now I would have to start all over again from scratch? Knowing that even the words “we’ll keep in touch” made me so angry and sad because they’re always said with the best intentions but rarely any true follow-through. (To be fair, though, I was diagnosed with BPD in early 2020, which is characterized by, among other things, emotional reactivity and a fear of abandonment).

So I started writing “the moon play” as a metaphor for what I wanted to but could not do – leave everything and everyone behind. Human relationships are a pain to create and they hurt too much when they end, so it’s better to just not have them at all. I started writing “conversations” between June and “Houston”, conversations that I couldn’t have with the people I really wanted to.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Like a lot of people, I started doing theater in high school, and very much enjoyed it. It was probably one of the five things total I enjoyed about high school in general, so much that I decided to continue studying it in college. Graduating with a B.A. in Theater Arts literally just before COVID hit is what some would call “dramatic irony”.

While in school and a little bit after I had already done some readings and professional productions in the Portland theatre area, and participated a bit in the poetry scene as well (shoutout to Slamlandia, those Thursday nights were sometimes the brightest part of my week). I moved out to Philadelphia to join a “theater collective’ in the summer of 2021, hoping to eventually make it to New York, but that fizzled out spectacularly after a month, so then I moved back home to Riverside, CA, to pick myself back up and try the “West Coast actor” thing and get some on-camera experience.

I consider myself primarily an actor, but also understand that most of the time nowadays if you want to work you have to make your own work too. Hence, “the moon play”. Hence, Do It For Mead Productions, which is a sort of rag-tag theater company I founded to help produce “the moon play” in it’s first incarnation, back when it was called “i defy you, stars” as a part of the 2021 Portland Fertile Ground Festival. Do It For Mead also produced “The Misadventures of Missy Black; A Pirate Play” written by my best friend, Riley Olson, the following year. Mainly because when I asked her upon the play’s completion what she wanted to do with it, she said “it’d be cool to see it on it’s feet.”

“Oh, nice.” Beat. “We could do that.”

If there’s anything I’m proud of, it’s that. The “this doesn’t exist yet so I’m gonna make it” attitude. I don’t know what you’d call it, tenacity? But also an aspect of flexibility to it, too. Philly didn’t work out, but I didn’t give up. I’m still here, doing the actor thing, I’ve got representation and a handful of credits and I’m still making the art I want to see in the world too. That’s kind of the thesis of Do It For Mead: “Make the art you want to see in the world, even better if it’s with friends.”

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I think the word “representation” is a big word right now. I think it’s a wonderful thing for audiences to see themselves reflected both onstage and onscreen. I also think it does a disservice to those audiences if that representation is also “put in a box” to be checked off, if that makes any sense.

I write primarily from what I know, which is my experience as a queer, neurodivergent Asian-American woman. In “the moon play”, June is written as a queer Asian-American woman. She cannot be played by anyone other than an Asian (ideally, Vietnamese) actor. The thing is, her “Asianness” and her “queerness” aren’t really as big of factors in her emotional journey throughout the show as is her “June”-ness, or her stubborn insistence to stay on the Moon and ignore humanity. One could, theoretically, swap her out for a white, straight man and change a couple details without the overall character arc being affected. Though, I certainly don’t know why anyone would want to.

There’s a similar sort of thing going on in Annie Baker’s 2015 play, “John”; the character Jenny Chung is specified as Asian in the character description, an aspect that never really comes up in the play’s actual dialogue or dynamics of the dysfunctional relationship that the show revolves around. Her Asianness doesn’t become the butt of a joke nor does it lead to a moment of self-discovery or illumination about her childhood or immigration or cultural identity. It’s just…part of her character as much as hair color or shoe size.

And this is not to harp on media that DOES focus on identity! I just think it’s really cool when characters are allowed to exist in their queerness or cultural identity without it becoming the defining point of their character arc. I love writing stories that create that sort of space, and I love acting within that space that allows both identification with and self-actualization as a person beyond social identity.

Alright – so here’s a fun one. What do you think about NFTs?

I’ve got some tulips to sell you in 1637.

Contact Info:

• Website: maddienguyen.com
• Instagram: @the_mad_dy_hatter
• IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm12425118/

Image Credits
Mia Isabella Photography