Project Title:  The Leavers

 

Created by:  Trong Gia Nguyen

 

In collaboration with: 

David Raymond and Brian Rhinehart

Duration:

Approximately 80-90 minutes

 

Venue:
Seeking a theater space with standard to advanced stage lighting, sound and projection capacities. Accommodating an audience of 300-500 people, or more.

 

Production Budget:
$75,000-$100,000 to finance rehearsals, talent, digital specialists, musicians, etc. Seeking venues that preferably have supporting production funds already in place, though fundraising from creative side is also possible.

 

Actors/Performers:

10-12

 

Time and Location:
The Leavers is intended to travel. Ideally it would premiere in 2025, the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. Cities with significant immigrant and diasporic populations are most desirable, including New York City, Berlin, Brussels, Los Angeles, Miami, and places with strong theater representation such as Avignon and Washington D.C.

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Play Script:

Performance in 7 acts. To request the play script, please send a note HERE.

 

Synopsis:
Incorporating theater, movement, installation art, and new media (video and slide projection, AI generated content, etc), The Leavers weaves a narrative of seemingly unconnected fragments, from personal archives and modern newsreels, to the aesthetics of Ted Talks, bodybuilding competitions, monument building, and extremist protests to the Trail of Tears and old Renault car ads.

 

The Leavers conflates personal narrative with sweeping societal conflicts, with an American Pop culture bent. The personal experience expands into a broader story within the Vietnamese diaspora and far beyond, framing a universal struggle where the tentacles of “RE-colonization” and institutionalized violence come home everywhere to root, from an overcrowded boat to the high school gymnasium.

 

The base material for The Leavers comes from recorded video footage made 13 years ago of artist Trong Gia Nguyen’s family, when he and friend David Raymond traveled cross country to interview the remaining members of his large family (14) that left together on the last day of the Vietnam War, yet never spoke of it again. What was suppose to be a filmic documentary, titled DONG, was never completed for multiple reasons. Last year Nguyen decided to resurrect the project as a performance work.

 

The Leavers examines the plight of the immigrant experience as a prism splintering into surreal yet parallel spaces. Having lived in the United States, Europe and Vietnam over the last 15 years, it is essential to the artist that The Leavers eschews certain platitudes of political correctness and tropes of intersectionality. One scene might depict a border checkpoint with no clear distinction between who is going where or for what purposes. Another scene blends a skewed Ted Talk with the incursion of a mob carrying “Yellow Power” signs. Emphasis is placed on a fluid reckoning of history, where the intimacy of ignorance and fallible memory impose their sense of revisionism on the past, even as it plows into the future.​

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Scenic Design:
Set-wise, the stage requires multiple projection surfaces, where spectres of the past are beamed from digital video and slide projectors to co-exist with the actors, while the props double as sculptures that would feel equally at home in an art gallery context.

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Music:
Musically The Leavers takes its inspiration from the soulful rock and pop sounds of Vietnamese music from the early 1970s. For the soundtrack, Nguyen is collaborating with Detroit indie rock musician Fred Thomas , whose critically acclaimed band Saturday Looks Good to Me had already recorded Cái Trâm Em Cài (1972, written by Carol Kim) for another Nguyen project.

 

Bios:
The principal creator behind The Leavers is Trong Gia Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American artist currently based in Brussels, Belgium. His collaborators include longtime friend and surrealist photography collector David Raymond, who currently resides in Asheville, North Carolina. The two recently produced a quasi-documentary film titled The Last Letter Writer, which premiered at Black Mountain College Museum and Art Center in 2023. Adding theater expertise to The Leavers project is Brian Rhinehart, a stage director based in New York who is also a professor at the Actors Studio Drama School.

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Updates: Trong is currently artist-in-residence at Villa Empain (Brussels, Belgium)  to work on the project. He and his collaborators were able to work on the physical creation of The Leavers in April and September, with the help of Brian's Masterclass and graduate students in New York and Brussels.

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Supporting Assets:

* Please note: Clips represent early stages of physical creation (workshops have consisted of two 3-hour sessions with professional and amateur actors in each city - New York and Brussels, respectively).