Interview: Jon Viktor Corpuz of A DRIVING BEAT at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley

Although Jon Viktor Corpuz is still quite young, he’s far from a novice actor, having already appeared on Broadway in The King and I, toured the country in Hamilton and performed at the White House. After those massive gigs, though, he’s happy to be changing things up with a lead role in TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s intimate world premiere production of A Driving Beat, written by Chicanx Bay Area native Jordan Ramirez Puckett.

Corpuz stars as Mateo, a teenager whose love of hip-hop music helps him process his feelings as he embarks on a cross-country road trip alongside his adoptive mother, seeking answers about his identity along the way. As they travel the country, he translates his feelings into spoken word moments. The play’s titular "beats" for this rhythmically-focused play are composed by Bay Area musician/educator Carlos Aguirre, who has been a guest artist with Lin-Manuel Miranda's Freestyle Love Supreme and shared the stage with The Roots, Eryka Badu and Mary J. Blige, among others. 

I spoke with Corpuz by phone last week while he was immersed in the rehearsal process. The New York-based actor readily admits he’d been pretty ignorant of the West coast theater scene, but now feels like he’s landed in a pot of jam at TheatreWorks, marveling over how talented his colleagues are and how well he’s been taken care of by the entire team. A Driving Beat presents a bit of a new challenge for him as he’s never before had a speaking role in a non-musical, but it’s also a piece for which he is extremely well-suited as it mirrors his experience traveling the country in the hip-hop influenced Hamilton. Chatting with him, I was struck by his enthusiastic nature, passion for theater and knowledge of Broadway musicals. The following has been condensed and edited for clarity. 

This is your TheatreWorks debut. How did you get involved with the show?

This just came through my agent, I suppose because of the character being brown, there being a spoken word element, and then also the character being a very specific age. I’m just blown away by the TheatreWorks team. These are people at the height of artistry, and I’m learning so much about kind the West coast ecosystem and culture. I’m just ignorant. [laughs] I’ve been an East coast boy my entire life – I grew up in Florida, then moved to New York, so I didn’t know much about the West coast.

How are rap and spoken word incorporated into the script?

It’s a road trip between a mother and her adopted son, and they’re on this journey to find out more information about my character, Mateo’s, birth parents. So they’re on this cross-country trip and he has an enthusiasm for hip-hop music and spoken word, and he’s trying to do it himself. He uses static on the radio as a beat to form these poems and performance moments in his mind, and as it progresses you get to know his inner life through these spoken word moments.

I want to give a shout out to Carlos Aguirre. He’s a Bay Area theater artist, poet and musician, and he’s made the beats for the show and has also helped me with the spoken word and musical elements of the show. And he’s an actor, too, so he has that language to speak to me both on a character level and also on a style and musical delivery level. He’s such an unexpected gem in the process because I didn’t know that he was going to be involved. And, wow, he’s great. People should check him out.

The TheatreWorks production is part of a rolling world premiere. Is Jordan Ramirez Puckett’s script still in flux?

Yes, and that’s been thrilling, actually. I haven’t been in a process like this in quite a while. There are changes being made in the room, based on us as actors who are embodying these characters Jordan has written.

How would you describe Mateo, the character you play?

He’s this really spirited 14-going-on-15-year-old, and he wants to make it to the hospital where he was born in San Diego by his birthday. He’s really trying to find answers and has this rich inner life and at the same time loves his mom so much. He’s determined to figure things out for himself and find out more about who he is. What’s been amazing about being able to be in his shoes for these couple weeks that we’ve been rehearsing is that he’s really driven to action. He sees something that he wants to do and is going to go try to make that happen.

Your director, Jeffrey Lo, is very well known in the Bay Area, but this is your first time working with him. What do you think is his secret sauce as a director?

Jeffrey has such a kindness and a thoughtfulness and an openness to ideas. It feels like a true collaboration - like let’s investigate, let’s experiment. None of us has “the” answer, we’re all just trying to find it together. So it’s a matter of trust, I think, and also being a friendly person outside of rehearsal. He strikes a really good balance of working very hard but also understanding that we’re here to connect with each other as people.

You started acting pretty young. What was your first professional gig?

Well, I guess my first professional gig was A Midsummer Night’s Dream directed by Julie Taymor.

Which is pretty amazing!

Yeah, and for the fairies she had this idea of calling them “rude elementals,” so we were kind of these woodland tribal creatures instead of the typical fairies that you see in Midsummer. She cast all these children, and we were all non-Equity. It was the inaugural production of Theatre for a New Audience moving into their new home, which they still have in Brooklyn. That was my first time doing eight shows a week, and I was… 16, I want to say?

Did you fully realize who Julie Taymor was?

Yes, because I’m a Broadway nerd. [laughs] So I knew of her legendary Lion King, of course, and also her opera work like Magic Flute. And Midsummer was actually the first production she had done post-Spider-Man, so it was kind of a return to New York for her, too.

You toured across the country in Hamilton, playing a son of the title character. What did you take away from that experience?

I think my experience touring with Hamilton is a great mirror in a way to this experience, because this is a show about a road trip. I’ve seen a lot of these places that are in the show and I’ve had that first-hand experience of being on the road, and also with that show being so hip-hop influenced, there is a kind of parallel there, too. I’m finding myself in these shows that have elements of both theater and music, and specifically hip-hop and spoken word and rap. It’s been interesting to kind of thread that and almost compare the two, and to be able to draw on those performance and travel experiences for this show.

I saw you as the prince in the Lincoln Center production of The King and I and remember being impressed by the groundedness you brought to the role. Is it true that to get in the mood for the king’s death scene you’d listen to “No One Is Alone” from Into the Woods backstage on your iPod?

Omigod – yes, that’s something I would do. That’s around the time when that movie was coming out, with Meryl Streep and everything, and my points of reference were pop music and Broadway musicals. My character arc in King and I was very much about a son and his parents, and the responsibility of a young person who then has to lead a country. So there’s this isolation that that character felt, and this complicated relationship of duty and also of familial love between his parents and him, so that song felt kind of fitting.

As a kid growing up in Florida, how was it that you came to discover your inner Broadway nerd?

I think it was DVDs of Andrew Lloyd Webber shows. I feel like a lot of us theater kids are drawn to his work when we’re children. I don’t know what the psychological reason is behind that, but it’s the case for a lot of us, which is really interesting. Specifically, Cats was kind of my entry point - and also Cathy Rigby’s Peter Pan. And we’d see shows that would come through Tampa.

During the run of King and I you appeared opposite both Kelli O’Hara and the late Marin Mazzie, two of the greatest sopranos in musical theater history. How would you describe working with one versus the other?

Well, they’re both just supernovas, though my young brain at the time couldn’t quite comprehend the magnitude of their talent. I remember being so nervous at table read day, meet and greet day, and fixing my hair in a mirror in the hallway on break, and Kelli saw me doing that and she was like “Your hair looks great.” From just that little comment of comfort, you know leading in a kind of quiet but grounded way, I felt respect from her as a co-actor. Austin Pendleton sent me an email saying he really liked my performance in the show, and she called me into her dressing room and made me understand the magnitude of him, cause I wasn’t familiar with his work, but obviously he’s a legendary figure in the theatrical world. So little things like that – I would get gentle guidance from Kelli. And there’s a sportiness about her. I know she was an athlete when she was in grade school so she still has that down to work, grounded athletic energy.

Marin, I only worked with for two months because Kelli left the show and they got Marin to replace her, and that was a whole different energy because she was in remission [from ovarian cancer] I believe at the time. So it was this kind of triumphant moment for her to perform, at all. Marin’s warmth and not taking herself too seriously, that’s what I remember, and her smile. And also a generosity. I have this vivid memory - I went to a performing arts high school, and one of my teachers came who was a fan of Marin, so I was like “Oh, do you want to meet her?” So I introduced him to Marin, and I remember her being like “Isn’t he great?” - you know, talking about me. We weren’t hanging out outside of the show really, we were at very different points in our lives, but just her ease with saying that, I don’t know – she didn’t feel at all like she thought she was above anyone else. She seemed earthly and grounded to me.

So that show certainly – I mean between Kelli, Marin, also Hoon Lee, Ken Watanabe, Ruthie Ann Miles – gave me so many people to look up to. It was only a year and a half of my life, but very formative and I still look to those people and remember those experiences really vividly and fondly because they were such great models of how to be serious in your work and also how to be dignified and gracious as a person offstage, too. They were great, great people to study and be in close proximity with, and the farther away I get from that experience, the more I appreciate it.

That cast featured a number of up-and-coming performers of Asian descent who have since gone on to forge significant careers in the theater, like Ruthie Ann Miles, Conrad Ricamora and Ashley Park. As the youngster amongst that group, did that give you an inkling of “Wow, this could actually be a career for me?”

Well, Ruthie and Conrad had been fresh off Here Lies Love at the Public, but when Hamilton came into the picture in 2015 is when I felt kind of an industry shift, in terms of speaking about diversity in a more open way, and trying to track beyond shows like Miss Saigon and King and I “Is a career possible?” It did feel like the company, we were all trying to figure that out. That was a question in the air amongst all of us, because for so many of us it was our first big thing. I think that was even Ruthie’s Broadway debut; it was certainly Conrad’s. For so many of us it was like “What is this?” It was such a fresh kind of big, grand experience for a lot of us.

As you transition into adult roles, what kind of career do you hope to have?

Well, I think this play is such a good representation of the direction that I love, even as an audience member. First of all, I’m so happy to be doing a play. I haven’t really done one professionally. I mean, I did Midsummer, but I didn’t have any lines! [laughs] So I wasn’t really getting to explore that version of being in a play. In terms of picking up more responsibility in a play, I’m really happy to be doing a show like this that’s smaller – I mean, there’s only three of us in the show.

I have a curiosity to do so many things. I’ve a lot of the time made a living doing bigger musicals, but as an audience member I really am drawn to these kind of intimate stories. This is maybe tangential, but – I became a huge fan of this play called Primary Trust, which won the Pulitzer, and Jeffrey’s directing later this season [at TheatreWorks]. I’ve traveled around the country to see it in Chicago, at La Jolla, in DC and New York, too. Jeffrey actually yesterday he had me be a reader for one of the people auditioning, but he didn’t know any of that when he asked me to do the reading. And then he was like “Oh, wow, you’re like a really big fan!” [laughs] In any case, I think there’s some similarity between Primary Trust and A Driving Beat. Shows like this I feel really drawn to, specifically as an audience member, so I feel really lucky to be able to be in one.

You’ve done super high-profile productions like King and I, Hamilton and the Radio City Christmas Spectacular, and you’ve even performed at the White House. Now you’re in a show that’s really intimate, just you and a couple of other actors onstage, so there’s nowhere to hide. Which of those experiences – the big ones or this more intimate one – do you find more terrifying?

Oh – all of them! [laughs] I think there’s a terrifying element about performing in general, but in different ways. What’s really kind of amazing about A Driving Beat is that, first of all, our playwright, Jordan Ramirez Puckett, is a San Jose native, and the space that we’re going to be doing it in is the Second Stage at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, and that hasn’t been performed in [for a number of years]. I saw the Little Women production that just wrapped up, and then myself and another actor snuck into the theater [next door] just to see it. It’s a really lovely, intimate thrust space and the audience kind of surrounds the stage. So there is a terrifying element to that, but it also feels like a really amazing opportunity for a deeper connection to this story that’s being told, between the actors on the stage and the audience. I just think that energy will be felt in a deeper way. I’ve been a little more choosy lately in terms of my career, and I really think this play’s so strong and fun and moving.

(header photo of Jon Viktor Corpuz and Lee Ann Payne by Tracy Martin)

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