HHF at the Columns

Yesterday, March 8th was the DFW Column Awards, celebrating local theatre here in Dallas. Audacity's HELLO HUMAN FEMALE was up for six 2010 Column Awards and took home two. Jeff Swearingen won Best Actor in Dallas (Non-Equity) for his portrayal of Blork and Arianna Movassagh won Best Actress in Dallas (Non-equity) for playing Tamela.


We also put on the "Somewhere Out There" number at the Awards ceremony. We were delighted, too, that HHF was the only "straight" play represented in the evening's entertainment.

CHOP opens

CHOP opened last night for the world to see. It World premiered at Addison Water Tower Theatre's Out of the Loop Fringe Festival. Out of the 10 or 12 folks in the audience on this Thursday opening, two were critics.

Mark Lowry at TheatreJones.com enjoyed it... kinda.

He pegs it pretty dead-on that it is a solid festival piece. Which is true, I think.

A fellow I've never heard of named David Novinski came out to cover it for D Magazine's new FrontRow reviews/arts coverage section online. He did not really get into the spirit of the piece, but did offer one observation that will prove helpful.

The piece is smart, littered with mythological and scientific references. I had a line or two in before that explained that the character in the show was a temp and had lots of time to fill, so he turned to reading ("I had plenty of time to read. I'm a reader."), but I cut that line last week. It might be a good idea to put it back in for those folks, like Mr. Novinski, who get caught up in overly logical detail points in the story.

I also admire Mr. Novinski's review in that he both embodies and illustrates a very typical attitude among lots of my audience members in Dallas. Some are really adventurous and open, but some bring into the space a stuffy, uptight closedness. Their tastes run very fickle. This isn't malicious or purposeful on their parts, but it happens. They can't really let go and have fun and engage fully. I'm not sure why this is, but maybe it has to do with the wider culture becoming more isolated through personal technology.

Anyway, now that the very first showing ever for an audience has taken place, i can get down to the real work on CHOP. I can learn about the piece through the audiences eyes.Here's to the continuing adventure...

Mark Lowry's TheatreJones.com review here.

David Novinski's FrontRow review here.

~ Brad

The story of CHOP

The Out of the Loop Fringe Festival will be the setting for the World Premiere of CHOP, my twisted little one-man show. This production is important to me for several reasons...

As a local playwright, it is important to me to try to premiere my plays in Texas if at all possible. The piece received a staged reading by Outsider's Inn Collective in Seattle in October of 2008. It was workshopped by NYC's Cry Havoc in March of 2009. This workshop was directed by New York director Andy Merkel and performed by William Jackson Harper (ex-Dallasite, friend, and actor in the Lynne Nottage's Pulitzer Prize winning RUINED). Will was slated to be in this Loop version until he got cast in a production there in NYC at Off-Broadway's Playwright's Horizons.

I agreed to step up and perform the show myself, which will give me the opportunity to develop the piece from the inside out. I do not act in traditional theatre productions very often any more and I very rarely act in my own work. The whole endeavor has been like walking back into a room you remember from many years ago, trying to put together exactly where you stored away things in that space. Old muscles are creaking back into use. So now it is quite an adventure.

I flew to NYC and worked with a really generous, diligent director, Mr. Andy Merkel. He was working with Will and he agreed to help me do the piece myself. I ventured through the snow to his apartment in Red Hook, Brooklyn everyday for a week of 8-hour rehearsals. He really is responsible for putting the foundation of the staging together and I can't thank him enough. So, little old me comes out of acting retirement, the playwright Brad McEntire, is venturing into the Out of the Loop Fringe Festival.

Rehearsing CHOP at director Andy Merkel's apartment, Red Hook, Brooklyn.
February 25, 2010

Blurry pic of me walking back to the bus stop in Red Hook, Brooklyn
after CHOP rehearsals with Andy Merkel.

The piece grew out of two aspects of my life. First, the character and story are partly pulled from a previous abandoned play (my Thesis play for grad school at Texas Woman's University). Second, in 2006-2007 I lived and worked in Hong Kong. The experience of being a stranger in a strange land led me back to the piece and my feelings of isolation, distance and separateness during my overseas travels show up thematically in the work.

The first draft was completed in Hong Kong in summer of 2007, shortly before I came back to the States.

So, the piece has been on my mind for over two years. Along the way, as it came together, I brought up what I was doing to a variety of people and they often offered suggestions, ideas and the like. For instance, my friend Paul was who introduced me to apotemnophilia. Up until then, I didn't know it was even a real thing. My hope is that by running it in front of audiences, I'll find out even more and more about the piece.

CHOP has been accepted into the 2010 Phoenix Fringe Festival in Arizona in April, 2010. That's its next stop after Out of the Loop.

~BDM

VOLUME OF SMOKE approaches

“No tongue can tell, no pen describe the woeful catastrophe. No person who was not there can form any idea of the unexampled scene of human distress.”

—The American Standard, December, 1811

Directed by Ruth Engel

Featuring: Angela Parsons, Elizabeth Evans, Rhianna Mack, Oscar Contreras, Chris Piper and Tyson Rinehart.

Lighting design by Jaymes Gregory.

On December 26th, 1811, the Richmond Theatre burned to the ground. A standing-room only audience of 600 people had gathered that night to see a touring company present a billing of several different pieces. During The Bleeding Nun, a short play of haunted star-crossed lovers, the fire began. Of those 600 in attendance, seventy died—many women and children, many trampled in the panic that ensued. The dead included the newly-elected Governor, George W. Smith, who died after saving his wife’s life. The incident made headlines as far away as Germany and gave rise to the Second Great Awakening. 

In response to the tragedy, Richmond, VA, erected a church on the ashes of the theatre and banned all public performance (including street musicians) for eight years. The price of breaking the law was a ticket for six dollars and sixty-six cents. 

Weaving together a narrative out of more than twenty different characters in his signature lyrical-prose style, Clay McLeod Chapman constructs a narrative of the lead up to and aftermath from the Great Richmond Theatre Fire in the play VOLUME OF SMOKE. Based on interviews conducted with survivors of the fire in an unpublished 19th-century manuscript, VOLUME OF SMOKE is a beautiful, moving, surprisingly funny voyage into the heart of disaster and our responses to it. 

Playing March 11 - 27, 2010 (Wednesday thru Saturdays)

At the Bath House Cultural Center, 512 East Lawther Drive, Dallas TX. Map here.

HHF: REMOUNT pics

HELLO HUMAN FEMALE: THE REMOUNT - Notes On the Play

 About the Play
 

(From the program insert)

HELLO HUMAN FEMALE is set in motion when an online dating service connects Tamela, a guileless 37 year-old virgin looking for love, with Dr. Gorn, an evil scientist with ambitions of world domination. Things don't go according to Dr. Gorn's dastardly plan when Tamela falls instantly in love with his henchman, Blork, a simple, misshapen creation of the evil scientist's. When Tamela takes Blork home to Mother, Blork is quickly sent away on what ultimately becomes a journey of self-discovery. The play follows Blork on his trek, with Tamela hot on his trail. 

HELLO HUMAN FEMALE is a whimsical and heart-warming tale with the message that being full of love, kindness, and understanding can make up for a lot of our apparent shortcomings. 

The play was originally commissioned in the summer of 2008 when ATL Artistic Director Brad McEntire went to Chicago to take a long-weekend Improv Intensive. Matt and Kim Lyle graciously offered their couch at their cozy apartment and McEntire enjoyed, not just a place to sleep, but good company and cold beverages with the Lyles on their second story wooden patio. Asked if he had anything he might want to write for ATL, Lyle handed McEntire a few sketches he'd written. One really stood out. It was the first scene of Gorn and Tamela e-mailing about their Match.com compatibility. McEntire immediately commissioned a full-length play from Lyle to produce through Audacity.

Lyle worked on the piece for the rest of the summer and autumn of 2008. A full-draft came about bringing into the world Blork, Mother, Homeless Harry, Gramps and Timmy. 

The play was produced in February and March of 2009 and went over well with critics and audiences alike. Since the original world-premiere production the play has shown up on several Top Ten Lists and garnered awards for some of the performers as well as Mr. Lyle. That production also introduced the Metroplex to the groovy little performance space in Exposition Park run by Matt Posey - The Ochre House. 

 Enough people came out of the woodwork after the play ended who hadn't had a chance to see it that Lyle, McEntire and the cast decided they'd take a shot at remounting HELLO HUMAN FEMALE in the future.

And that's what you are looking at tonight… HHF 2.0. The Remount.