A look back at the Dallas premiere of ANESTHESIOLOGIST

Overtime Theatre in San Antonio is currently running my play FOR THE LOVE OF AN ANESTHESIOLOGIST. They have a wonderful production and did several delightful things with it that I never would have thought of. It reminded me of working on the piece myself (I directed and designed as well) way back in the summer of 2004. I remember having a blast! I had a great cast and my dear friend Jeff Swearingen got to play his first lead role. No solid video survives of that production and just a scant few photos, but I'll put a few below as well as a few of my first really glowing reviews.

Here's to looking back at FOR THE LOVE OF AN ANESTHESIOLOGIST...

Dallas Observer - July 22, 2004 - By Andrea Grimes

In Friday's finale, For the Love of an Anesthesiologist, Texas-born writer and director Brad McEntire achieves, nay, creates new levels of hilarity in a Tarantino-meets-Twilight Zone effort from Audacity Productions. Alfred (Jeff Swearingen), an occasionally spastic man on the run, searches for meaning, an anesthesiologist (Maura Murphy) and his way out of an eerie island bar. Joining him are a transgendered cocktail waitress (Julie Reinagel), a man in a trench coat (Kenneth Fulenwider, who steals the show) and a pirate-like Parisian ex-lover (Trista Wyly). Love shouldn't be missed.

Absurd comedy is a real knockout

A tantalizing slice of artful hilarity premieres at a Dallas theater festival.

By Perry Stewart (Special to the Star-Telegram - 7/20/2004)

 

Perhaps For the Love of an Anesthesiologist will one day be presented as a companion play to The Tale of the Allergist's Wife. For the present, in its premiere run at the Festival of Independent Theatres, Brad McEntire's comedy shares the bill with two other one-act works that seem pedestrian alongside its artful absurdity. 

A packed house had thinned noticeably Friday by the time Anesthesiologist, the last of the three that evening, took the stage at the Bath House Cultural Center. Audience members who left early missed the gem of the trio. (What's with these people? Do they leave baseball games after the sixth inning?) 

Staged under the banner of the appropriately named Audacity Productions, McEntire's play introduces the fugitive Alfred -- portrayed with manic gusto by Jeff Swearingen, who looks like Emilio Estevez and sounds like a young Richard Dreyfuss on speed. 

Alfred abides in a purgatorial way station where various people from his past parade by. Several are played by Kenneth Fulenwider, who has one encounter with Swearingen that's right out of Waiting for Godot. 

Trista Wyly, who has delighted Hip Pocket Theatre and Pocket Sandwich Theatre audiences, is marvelous here as a kinky Eurotrash countess.