A Short History of Pork Filled Players/Productions

Pork Filled History

The Pork Filled Players burst onto the Seattle scene in 1998, blending community activism with theatrical passion. Founded by Wally Glenn, David Kobayashi, Roger Tang, and Ellen Williams (who later found TV sitcom stardom on such shows as How I Met Your Mother), the Players focused their efforts toward a (then) rarely seen medium in Asian American theater: Asian American comedy.

The Players established a unique voice in the Seattle Asian American community, becoming artists in residence at the Northwest Asian American Theatre, and writing and producing late night sketch comedy shows. They also spread into the wider sketch comedy community, as peers of such fabled groups as Mike Daisey’s Up In You Grill, Bald Faced Lie, and The Habit. They were charter performers at the first Seattle SketchFest, the nation’s longest-running sketch comedy festival, and hold the current record for the most return appearances in the festival.

During this time, they also toured throughout the Pacific Northwest, appearing in festivals such as Bumbershoot, the Seattle Fringe Festival, and Vancouver BC’s SketchOff@%#?, the first International Asian Canadian/American sketch comedy competition.

Seeking new horizons to conquer, in 2007, the Players staged their first full-length play and went on to produce several more, including the Northwest premiere of Yellow Face, a timely farce of mistaken racial identity by Tony Award winner David Henry Hwang. Meanwhile, they still maintained their presence as Seattle’s longest-running sketch comedy group with regular full-length sketch comedy shows and hosting Spam*O*Rama, a comedy & music cabaret.

In 2013, as their members honed a growing ability to conceive and write longer works, the Players spun off their theatre efforts as Pork Filled Productions, while still retaining their sketch comedy work under the Pork Filled Players name.

As Pork Filled Productions, the group once again devoted their efforts to filling the gaps in the Asian American creative spectrum. When it once was Asian American comedy, the impetus now became bringing fun and spectacle back onto stage by embracing genre fiction like science fiction, fantasy, noir, steampunk and other "nerd" fiction.

With Seattle one of the capitals of steampunk, it was natural for the first effort to be a steampunk adventure, The Clockwork Professor. Wildly successful in selling out its venue in what was a normally dead theatre month in July, Professor sparked additional plays in what became The New Providence Trilogy, which included The Tumbleweed Zephyr (nominated for the 2016 Outstanding New Play in Seattle's Gregory Awards, given to outstanding Puget Sound area theatre artists) and A Hand of Talons (which was won a 2016 Gregory for Outstanding Costume Design and was nominated for a slew of Gypsy Awards, given out by Seattle area theare critics). In between this, PFP also presented the Northwest premiere of Carla Ching's Fast Company, a caper action/comedy about a Chinese American family of con men, which won a 2014 Footlight Award for best small theatre production from the Seattle Times.

Right now, after returning from showcasing The Tumbleweed Zephyr at the Fifth National Asian American Theater Conference and Festival, PFP is at work developing new plays from playwrights across the country in it Unleashed! series, featuring new pulp stories for the 21st Century.