If you want to start a theatre company in glutted markets like Chicago and New York, get a name that stands out. At least, that’s what two guest artists for OSF’s 2016 season have found out. Of course, it also helps to have a vision that explodes classics in startling new ways, or that champions a new genre of theatre inspired by comic books and other pop-culture adventures. Add in company monikers like “The Hypocrites” and “The Vampire Cowboys” and people will sit up and pay attention. 

Sean Graney and Qui Nguyen (pronounced “Kwee Gwinn”) make their OSF debuts in 2016 in the Thomas Theatre—the former as the adapter/director of a new country-andwestern version of Arthur Sullivan and W. S. Gilbert’s operetta The Yeomen of the Guard (February 24–October 30) and the latter with his play Vietgone (March 30–October 29), which lands in Ashland fresh off its world premiere with California’s South Coast Repertory. But both have logged serious time in the never-easy world of nonprofit theatre in cities overflowing with talent—and competition. 

In Graney’s case, he started The Hypocrites in Chicago in 1997 with a mission to reinvent classics. “There was a lot of realism going on in Chicago at that time. Now it’s changed,” says Graney. “But I wanted to make a company that could explore different styles of theatre other than just realism. We did absurdist plays in the very beginning. [The Hypocrites’ initial season included Sam Shepard’s early piece Action, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck and Eugene Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano.] 

“We were just lucky enough to get some really good press early on and we did really cheap shows and audiences came and we were lucky enough to sort of get a reputation. And I named the company ‘The Hypocrites,’ which I think gave us a leg up on the other people [doing theatre] in the ’90s, because we weren’t some ‘Color-Noun Theater Company.’ We were just named something that people had an easier time remembering.” 

Graney took a three-year break as artistic director, during which time he had a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and put together his critically acclaimed 12-hour opus, All Our Tragic, created from all the extant Greek tragedies. He returned to The Hypocrites’ helm in early 2015. Yeomen represents his fourth foray into Gilbert and Sullivan, after hugely successful versions of The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado and H.M.S. Pinafore began at The Hypocrites. The first two subsequently traveled to Boston’s American Repertory Theater, and Pirates stormed the stage at Actors Theatre of Louisville. But Yeomen is the first G & S show he’s created for a different company. (Artistic Director Bill Rauch suggested both Yeomen and its country-western aesthetic to Graney.) 

Nguyen’s company got its name from a trilogy of “live comic book” plays, collectively entitled “the Vampire Cowboy Trilogy,” created by Nguyen and his creative partner and co-artistic director, Robert Ross Parker, who met in graduate school at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. After the two men relocated to New York City in the early part of the new millennium, Nguyen says they were “having a hard time finding our niche with more mainstream companies.” So they decided to strike out on their own with a style that has since become known as “geek theatre.”

Nguyen notes that the name “Vampire Cowboys” didn’t sound like a good idea to everyone. “We joined an arts organization [in New York] that supports theatres. They told us ‘You shouldn’t name yourselves that. That’s the name of a fringe company, at best. It will never be taken seriously. You’ll never get a [New York] Times review.’ They said, ‘It sounds like you’re just going to be doing crazy shows.’ I want to do small crazy shows. That’s the whole point!’ ”

All of a piece

But though the pieces they’re bringing to OSF have some significant differences from their early work, both Graney and Nguyen identify these shows as part of a continuum or synthesis of earlier work.

Vietgone is drawn from the real story of Nguyen’s parents, who fled Vietnam in the last days of the American war and met in a refugee camp in Arkansas. Nguyen was born and raised in Arkansas. In that way, it’s similar to his very first play, Trial by Water, a grim drama about Vietnamese “boat people” inspired by the experiences of Nguyen’s cousin. But, says Nguyen, Vietgone “still uses all the Vampire Cowboys stuff—martial arts and hip-hop and other genre stuff.” 

Getting his parents to open up about their lives was the real challenge, says Nguyen. “To get the stories, I basically had to lie to my parents. It’s very common for immigrant kids—they don’t want to hash up [their parents’] sad memories.” To keep them from feeling that they were “under the microscope,” Nguyen told his parents that he was writing a play about Vietnamese refugees in 1975 and the fall of Saigon. Along the way, he’d present “wrong” facts about his parents in order to get them to open up. “I was actually conning them,” he says with a laugh. ‘So you and Mom married in Vietnam?’ ‘We weren’t married in Vietnam.’ ” 

For Graney, Gilbert and Sullivan initially entered his wheelhouse for the most pragmatic of reasons: He wanted to do more musicals as a way of expanding The Hypocrites’ audience and aesthetic. But a 2008 production of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera proved frustrating “because we couldn’t change anything. We usually do stuff in the public domain so we can have a relationship with it in the rehearsal room, we can modify it, talk to it, push it around, cut some things, rewrite other things,” says Graney. Despite his creative frustrations with that show, it proved financially successful—as did a subsequent Hypocrites revival of Cabaret that Graney didn’t direct. 

“As I was thinking of musicals I could direct, I was like ‘Oh boy, I wish there were musicals in the public domain. And then I was like, ‘Oh, Gilbert and Sullivan!’ But I was totally against them for some reason. I thought they were going to be too fluffy and not serious. I listened to The Pirates of Penzance and I read the libretto and I was blown away by how smart it was.” Mostly, says Graney, “I was blown away by how the whole spirit of the piece was so respectfully subversive, you know what I mean? It was pointing out the problems of society without really condemning anyone.” 

Going with what’s familiar

Both Yeomen and Vietgone are starting life away from Graney’s and Nguyen’s home companies, but there are also continuities in collaborators. Graney’s longtime musical team, Andra Velis Simon and Matt Kahler, are involved in Yeomen. And though Simon and Graney both note that the OSF show will start with a more developed draft than is typical in Hypocrites’ productions, Simon says, “It’s going to be the same [creative] process, but with different players. We all know each other so well that we know each other’s strengths and how to get the best out of each person.” Graney’s past productions have used the technique popularized by Scottish director John Doyle, where the actors are also the musicians. With help from OSF, they’ve already had developmental workshops in Chicago. 

Vietgone director May Adrales hasn’t directed for Vampire Cowboys before, but she and Nguyen have a shared vocabulary as children of immigrants. “My brain is exploding from having another Asian-American on my side of the table,” he says. Two cast members for Vietgone are company members with Vampire Cowboys (including Amy Kim Waschke, from OSF’s 2012 The White Snake). The rest, says Nguyen, will figure out “how to be able to do the rapping and the martial arts and craft of acting—walking that tightrope between comedy and serious.” He also warns, with a laugh, “It’s going to be vulgar and kind of strange and [will] jump back and forth.” 

For both Graney and Nguyen, the ultimate triumph seems to be that they’ve grown their careers—and their companies—while staying true to what made them want to make plays in the first place. After years of producing as a nonunion company (a commonplace situation in small Chicago theatre), The Hypocrites recently made the leap to a contract with Actors’ Equity. Graney says the difference between his last time as artistic director and now is that “being an artistic director, especially of an organization that is crossing the milliondollar mark, really takes a different kind of mentality. I have to figure out what that means for me and what that means for the organization.” 

And despite the early naysayers, the wacky names work. “The thing that we’ve been proudest about is that in the last eight years, we haven’t had an empty seat,” says Nguyen.