APAture 2002 : Artists

Featured Artists   |   Participating Artists

Michael Premsrirat : Theater

Michael Premsrirat is a mean-spirited, vengeful man who often confuses character assassination and vitriolic spew for searing wit. His only saving graces are that he is, by his own estimation: a pretty good guitarist, an okay writer, a slightly above mediocre actor, and reasonably competent in bed. Premsrirat was a modestly successful video artist in Los Angeles before he shot himself in the foot and left Southern California. His video works had appeared in a number of festivals around the nation, including Freewaves from J-Town (Los Angeles), Asian Cinevision's Videoscapes (New York), Visual Communications' Asian Pacific American Film Festival (Los Angeles) and National Asian American Telecommunications Association's San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. He moved to San Francisco to play alterna-pop and follow his dreams of stardom, drugs and groupies. Unfortunately, the band broke up. No stardom. No drugs. No groupies.

Currently, he is a writer, performer and sound designer with The 18 Mighty Mountain Warriors, an Asian Pacific Islander American sketch comedy group. The 18 Mighty Mountain Warriors have produced a number of feature presentations in the Bay Area, have toured nationally and have been featured artists at the Hong Kong Fringe Arts Festival. Other Bay Area theater work included a year as a companero of Campo Santo (a resident theater company at Intersection for the Arts), two-and-a-half years as Marketing Director for Asian American Theater Company, and productions as actor and director with Teatro ng Tanan and Bindlestiff Studio.

Premsrirat's first full-length play, THE CLOUDS, THE OCEAN AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN, won the 2000 East West Players New Voices Playwrighting Competition, received a reading in the Public Theater's 2001 New Work Now Festival, and premiered at Asian American Theater Company in 2001.

Artist Statement

A lot of Asian American theater sucks right now. Almost 50 years since the first Asian American-identified plays were produced in Hawai'i, and we're still doing immigrant stories and family stories and internment stories and ... oh, I don't know. Anyway, we can't ignore our past, and we must respect the efforts of everyone who has come before us and struggled, blah blah blah, but we're forgetting to look at who we are and who we could be. We haven't really started to chart courses for the community into the future. In my work, I am unqualified to look to the future; I'm only good enough to destroy the past and mangle the present.

Michael Premsrirat (rightmost) in performance

At APAture, you're going to see Asian American theater hit bottom. You're going to see the most awful stuff Asian Americans can possibly do on stage. Me and a bunch of crazy Pinoys and other non-Pinoys for Affirmative Action purposes are going to throw out the script and do a lot of stupid and loose improv. First, I'm going to screw with the audience, because Asian Americans are the most uptight and scared audience members at live performances I've ever seen. Second, we're going to make fun of all the crap all the other artists do, because they take themselves too damn seriously. Third, we're going to look at an alternate universe where Asians rule the world. It's probably going to suck, but we're going to that risk in order to show that Asian Americans need to take chances and not always do the right thing.

Links

18 Mighty Mountain Warriors