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"   Joe Jung, artistic director of New York&amp;#039;s Project: Theater, says bluntly, &amp;quot;Women are fascinated by men&amp;quot; by way of offering a reason for us to come see his adaptation of My Custom Van and 50 Other Mind-Blowing Essays That Will Blow Your Mind All Over Your Face, the 2008 book of dude-centric essays by comic actor Michael Ian Black (Stella, The State, Wet Hot American Summer). The show, currently running through April 24 at the Upper West Side&amp;#039;s Drilling Company Theatre, digs down deep into the thirtysomething-guy mind, where &amp;#039;80s nostalgia mixes with latent fantasies about building robots and throwing the ultimate taco party. &amp;quot;Women see men acting like boys every day,&amp;quot; Jung says. &amp;quot;I think [the play] is a very honest look at the strange world of modern men.&amp;quot; Jung talked to ELLE.com about adapting Black&amp;#039;s book for the stage and the modern-day-cool factor of Dungeons and Dragons.\u2014Rachel Rosenblit   ELLE: Why did you decide to adapt My Custom Van? Joe Jung: A friend came to my house to hang out and brought a copy of the book. We read it out loud and were just hysterically laughing. Afterward, we just looked at each other and were like, &amp;quot;Why don&amp;#039;t we do this for a show?&amp;quot; I just turned 32. I got married last year. I work at Citigroup doing International Franchise Management. But at night, I get to dress up in a silk robe and hang out with my friends and do this show.  ELLE: How would you describe the 30-year-old man of today? JJ: We&amp;#039;re done with school and there are pressures\u2014you&amp;#039;re expected to buckle down and grow up. There are a lot of people who do that and are miserable and don&amp;#039;t have an outlet. Look at the video game industry! Guys in their 30s are advancing to this weird level of sophistication in their video games and demanding that [the games] grow with them. It&amp;#039;s still this idea that it&amp;#039;s fun to shoot things and play football online and pretend that you&amp;#039;re in a rock band. Some guys go back to the frat reunion and get stuck hanging out with a bunch of 18-year-olds, telling stories about how awesome the frat was. You still want to dwell on how awesome things were. ELLE: There&amp;#039;s a lot of rehashing the glory days in this show, and a ton of early &amp;#039;90s nostalgia. Did it feel personal for you, having been a teenager then? JJ: Well, I was a big nerd and not very popular, and a lot of what you see in the show is my own neurosis about how I grew up. Our cast has a lot of talks about that\u2014none of us were really that cool. I spent a lot of time in my basement, playing with Legos and Transformers and creating weird fantasy worlds. I&amp;#039;m in that weird stage of looking at everything through the filter of the early &amp;#039;90s. I&amp;#039;ll listen to music and subconsciously\u2014or partly consciously\u2014think, Man, Pearl Jam&amp;#039;s Ten is such a better album! We tried to find some of that childish nostalgia that all of us 30-year-old guys in the show have. In the &amp;#039;80s I was definitely not cool. I liked building robots out of Legos and reading Dungeons and Dragons books. ELLE: But don&amp;#039;t you think that stuff has become sort of subversively cool? Like part of a hipster subculture? JJ: Yeah\u2014it&amp;#039;s very hip to do that now. There are coffee houses that have Dungeons and Dragons nights. People my age are like, Let&amp;#039;s do this out in the open! Let&amp;#039;s do this in the coffee shop! We&amp;#039;re old enough and successful enough in our jobs to have the confidence to do that. ELLE: You also have the confidence to rock a pretty ridiculous-looking fake mustache in the play. What did your wife say? JJ: Oh, she&amp;#039;s been laughing from the start. She asked me to put it on at home a couple times to remind her what I would look like if she&amp;#039;d let me grow a mustache. ELLE: She won&amp;#039;t? JJ: Absolutely not. But I&amp;#039;ll always have the fake. For more information on My Custom Van, visit http://www.projecttheater.org/calendar.html "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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