I felt that those in the academy would have a particular relation to it, which influenced my decision to move ahead and write it for the academic community I’m now a part of. I wouldn’t say that there was anything formal developed, but I did have a lot of conversations with grad students and professors about it, how they felt their own academic work connected (or didn’t connect) with the concerns of the broader community, et cetera.

LR: Prometheus Nguyen explores an incident that affects a family from the San Francisco Bay Area’s Vietnamese American community. Why did you choose to focus on this community in particular?

TR: I worked at the YWCA Rape Crisis Center in San Jose for two years, and San Jose’s a city with significant Vietnamese American and Chicano populations. I fell in love with San Jose, and I wanted to pay tribute to the city. Having said that, I wouldn’t say that Prometheus is “about” the Vietnamese American community of San Jose per se; it’s ultimately about the life choices of one woman from that community. But that community made sense for her narrative, and it was a community I was at least partly familiar with. It’s nicely liminal—liminal in terms of class and race dynamics in the complex social power structure of San Jose. Plus, since I knew the locations, had hung out in those locations, I felt qualified to provide the sorts of geographic and affective specificities that give the language a sense of reality (particularly present in Kronos’ epilogue). And of course, when possible, I like to provide opportunities for Asian American actors. Still, again, I’d like to emphasize that I’m not speaking for the Vietnamese American community of San Jose, not at all.

LR: Both of the main characters in Prometheus Nguyen can be described as “hybrid” characters, but in different senses of the word. Kronos, as his sister points out in Scene 4, exists as a vertically-layered composite figure: like Emmett Till, Vincent Chin, Oscar Grant, and others, he is one among many dead whose stories collectively bear witness to effects of systemic injustice. Prometheus’s identity, meanwhile, is split horizontally among multiple time points in the same thread: her three selves variously work together to convey the narrative and compete among themselves as each of them struggles for prominence within her ethos. Why did you decide to layer Kronos and Prometheus’s identities like this? Why build Kronos as a composite “everyman,” a blank slate of sorts, while deconstructing and distributing Prometheus’s identities between three voices, ages, and vocations?