Alvin Eng
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Speech, Communications and Theatre Arts
EMAIL: AEng@bmcc.cuny.edu
Office: S-628L
Office Hours: By Appointment
Phone: +1 (212) 220-8098
Alvin Eng is a native NYC playwright, performer, memoirist and educator. In his BMCC courses, “THE 100 Introduction to Theatre” and “SPE 100 Fundamentals of Speech,” the classes also explore the sub-themes of “Creating Identity, Community and Culture” through the Arts and Public Speaking and Oral History respectively.
For BMCC’s 2019 Asian Heritage Month Celebration he produced “Trying to Find Chinatown.” The program consisted of a staged reading of a one-act play of the same name by David Henry Hwang and a panel discussion, Creating Community and Identity for Under-Represented Voices, moderated by Professor Eng. The event was co-sponsored by BMCC’s Theatre Program and Center for Ethnic Studies, CCNY’s Theatre Program and CUNY’s Asian American/Asian Research Institute (AAARI). In Fall 2018, he co-facilitated a post-performance talkback and workshop with Dr. Daphnie Sicre, Immigrant Rights Activism and Community Organizing: How To Get Involved, in conjunction with BMCC Theatre Program’s production of “14” a play by José Casas, directed by Dr Sicre.
Prior to BMCC, he was an Assistant Professor in the Theatre Department of Goucher College and was also a Visiting Professor of Playwriting with the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College and the MFA Creative Writing Program at St. Francis College. For these appointments, as well as with the Theatre Departments of Fordham University, Marymount Manhattan College, and CCNY, he has also directed productions and taught Devised Theatre for Ensemble and Solo Performance, Dramaturgy and Script Analysis, Writing for Musical Stage, Theatre History and History of Asian American Theatre.
Expertise
Playwriting
Public Speaking
Asian American Theatre & Theatre History
Devised Theatre & Solo Performance
Dramaturgy & Script Analysis
Oral History for Page, Stage and Podcast
Degrees
Professor Eng holds an MFA in Playwriting/Musical Theatre Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Courses Taught
- The collaborative nature of the theatrical event will be explored in readings, presentations, play attendance, papers and creative projects. Contributions of the playwright, actor, director, designer, architect, critic, producer and audience will be investigated through selected periods, genres, theatre spaces and styles of production. The student's potential roles and responsibilities in creating theatre will be emphasized.
- The aim of this course is to develop effective skills in speech communication. The student examines how to generate topics and organized ideas, masters elements of audience psychology and practices techniques of speech presentation in a public forum. All elements of speech production and presentation are considered.
Research and Projects
Professor Eng’s current academic and artistic research focuses on two primary projects that he is currently completing:
The first is Our Laundry, Our Town: A Memoir Travelogue through Chinese America. This is a prose expansion of his solo performance, The Last Emperor of Flushing “
The Imperial Image is the third and final installation of PORTRAIT PLAYS: A Cycle of Historical Dramas that examine the parallels between portraiture, history and power as manifested in the convergence of different disciplines, eras and cultures. The Imperial Image is a triptych that opens in Mughal era India in Emperor Akbar’s Palace Atelier. The middle stage panel is primarily a monologue for Marie Antoinette’s court portraitist, Élisabeth Vigée LeBrun, in exile from the French Revolution in the Court of Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg. The play concludes with a re-imagining of the circumstances surrounding Shepard Fairey’s creation of the ubiquitous “Hope” poster for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign
The second Portrait Play, 33 &1/3 Cornelia Street, was the focus of an NYU Fales Library and Special Collections staged reading and public discussion. This play dramatizes the fateful events that forever bonded the legacies of 1930s Bohemian Greenwich Village legends, Joe Gould, proto-Beat poet and controversial oral history figure, and Joseph Mitchell, renowned writer for The New Yorker Magazine, through the powerful vortex of revered painter Alice Neel’s groundbreaking 1933 portrait of Gould.
Three Trees, the first work of this cycle, explores the haunting relationship between influential 20th Century sculptor, the Swiss-born, Paris-based Alberto Giacometti, and his primary muse/model of the 1950s, Japanese Existentialist Philosopher Isaku Yanaihara. This play premiered Off-Broadway with the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre. Three Trees was also presented in developmental workshop with Baltimore Center Stage and the Moving Parts Theatre in Paris, as well as at the &now New Writing 2012 conference at the Sorbonne.
Publications
Selected Publications
Tokens? The NYC Asian American Experience On Stage (Temple University Press/Asian American Writers’ Workshop) Oral history author and play anthology editor; “Verbal Mural” oral history of the NYC Asian American and off-off Broadway theatre movements culled from interviews conducted with leading playwrights, producers, performers, community activists and theatre scholars
Action: The Nuyorican Poets Café Theatre Festival (Simon & Schuster)
Play script of “The Goong Hay Kid”
Aloud: The Nuyorican Poets Café Anthology (Holt) Poem and lyrics, “Twas The Night Before Chinese New Year,” and “Rock Me Goong Hay,” (from The Goong Hay Kid)
Honors, Awards and Affiliations
Professor Eng is a two-time Fulbright Specialist appointee as a Scholar in Theatre/U.S. Studies. During his first appointment, he conceived and directed a Devised Theatre Residency, Our Town: China/USA, at City University of Hong Kong. The students wrote and performed dramatic works in response to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. This Americana play actually contains many Chinese influences due to Wilder having spent part of his childhood in China when his father was U.S. Consul General to Hong Kong and Shanghai. In tandem with the residency, the U.S. Consulate, Guangzhou, invited Professor Eng to conduct theatre workshops and perform his memoir monologue, “The Last Emperor of Flushing,” in his family’s ancestral Guangdong Province.
