Qui Nguyen Awarded 2015 Steinberg Award for Off-Broadway Bound VIETGONE

Qui Nguyen's VIETGONE, currently playing at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in a production directed by May Adrales, has earned the playwright the 2015 Harold and Mimi Steinberg/American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award, as announced at a ceremony at the 2016 Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville.

The award is given annually to playwrights whose scripts premiered professionally outside of New York City and comes with a $25,000 prize.

Playwright Nguyen is the co-founder of Vampire Cowboys, an OBIE Award-winning "geek theatre" company that creates and produces new works of theatre based in action/adventure and dark comedy with a comic-book aesthetic. The company actively pursues the blending of different genres with varied theatrical styles to create an eclectic structure to tell its stories.

VIETGONE traces the true story of Nguyen's parents' 1975 escape from war-torn Saigon to a relocation camp in Arkansas. Rather than choosing to tell his family's story through a sentimental lens, Nguyen opted for a different approach, creating, in his words, "a sex comedy about my parents." VIETGONE will make its Off-Broadway debut at New York City Center's Stage I, presented by Manhattan Theatre Club. Previews begin Tuesday, October 4 before an October 25 opening. Visit manhattantheatreclub.com.

Two citations were also awarded, each coming with a prize of $7,500. They went to Steven Dietz's BLOOMSDAY, which had its world premiere at Seattle's ACT Theatre, and Jen Silverman's THE DANGEROUS HOUSE OF PRETTY MBANE, which had its world premiere at InterAct Theatre Company in Philadelphia.

BLOOMSDAY is about an American man searching for the Irish woman who won his heart thirty years ago leading him on a Bloomsday tour of Dublin. THE DANGEROUS HOUSE OF PRETTY MBANE is about a South American soccer star who runs a safe house for lesbians subjected to "corrective rape."

The winners were selected from twenty-eight eligible scripts and evaluated by a committee of led by Lou Harry of the Indianapolis Business Journal/IBJ.com.