The Fat Ninja, 1999
Fort Lewis College

The stage production of The Fat Ninja is an adaptation of a comic book published by Silver Wolf Publishing in 1986 with the same name with art by Gary Amaro.  Alex found and purchased a copy of Vol. 1 of the Fat Ninja at a small flee market and was intrigued by the over sized hero who had taken a vow of silence and had a deep love of all things fried. In his junior year Alex chose to adapt the basic story and characters introduced in the comic into script and then a stage production for his final in "Directing." Alex was able to track down volumes one through seven in the series and set about adapting the material into a script. Though there were a number of characters to choose between Alex chose to base his adaptation on the relationship between the Fat Ninja, the Crimson Ninja, and the master villain of the series that he renamed Hashish. 

Alex was heavily influenced by this work and studies in  Balinese Shadow Puppetry and decided to incorporate some of those conventions into his staging of the performance. While he chose to use live performers and a much more complicated lighting set up then the conventional single light source methods of the Balinese, he did use staging conventions and altered the structure of the comic story to fit more closely to the formulas of the Balinese productions.