Free Playwriting Workshop

I'm teaching a free playwriting workshop for high schoolers in conjunction with Junior Players and Kitchen Dog Theater's PUP Fest program. Info below. More info HERE.

Citywide Workshop (Lakewood) - PUP Fest 2013 by

STAPLE! Expo approaches...

This is just a smattering of the inventory...

Hernandez, Ruth and I are headed down to Austin next weekend to the STAPLE! Independent Media Expo. I'm taking a bunch of Donnie Rocket books, collections of plays, some zine-like RASPBERRY FIZZ copies, postcards and art prints. This will be my first time to have a table at any kind of convention and I am super-excited. If you are in Austin and want to either get your hands on some tasty McEntire -made media or just stop and say hello, we'll be set up at table 51.

Saturday, March 2 from 11AM-6PM and Sunday, March 3 from noon to 6PM at the Marchesa Hall and Theatre, 6406 N. IH-35, Suite 3100, Austin TX 78752 in the Lincoln Village Shopping Center. Ticket info HERE.

My Samuel Beckett play series postcards will be for sell!

On Assumptions, Plays and Hibernation

I recently posted an article on the Audacity Theatre Lab blog, Notes From The Lab about how small independent theatre companies, particularly ATL, must fight ingrained traditional assumptions about what theatre is, can do, and can operate.

Here's a quote:

As a small independent theatre, Audacity is under no obligation to do full-scale productions in a certain place. We don’t have to do anything in a designated theatre building. We don’t have to do plays. We only have to have someone do something where people can watch. Period. We can do projects that are pure improvisation, evenings of music and stories, stunts and happenings. We can do them anywhere we can drum up a crowd – bars, parks, patios, galleries, coffee shops, parking lots, living rooms, etc.

Also, there's a cuddly picture of a bear sleeping. Check it out HERE.

My Secret Island

I am experimenting lately, in an effort to improve both my drawing and visual story-telling skills. I am hand-drawing a narrative comic separate from Donnie Rocket Toaster-Face. I am not planning the story out ahead of time, but making it up, page by page, just to see where it can take me.  This is similar to how I perform longform improv.

You can see this little experiment unfold at: DribbleFunkComics.com

The Theater of Tensions

Some time back writer/scholar Troy Camplin reached out to me via email with questions about how my small theatre company, Audacity Theatre Lab, operated. He just sent me a link to his academic paper entitled "The Theater of Tensions" posted in an open-access online journal called Studies in Emergent Order. He investigates how non-profits might navigate the tensions between the competing values of artistic expression, market forces, the community/public and philanthropic pressures.

While I don't agree with 100% of his conclusions in the article, it is wonderful food-for-thought. Besides myself, Tim Shane of the now-defunct Hub Theatre and Jac Adler of Theatre Three (Dallas' second oldest continually operating theatre) are also quoted.

Take a look HERE. 

IT'S A GAMER'S LIFE

On February 13-16 the college where I work held a "Festival of New Plays" by student playwrights and I directed one of them.

I cast, directed and designed Ben Murphy's short play IT'S A GAMER'S LIFE about a man-child who glimpses his possible future. The actors were all students as well. It was a hard time crunch, but it turned out really nice.

With the playwright Benjamin Murphy

Monstre Sacré de L'Improvisation

I have become captivated with Parisian poster design from the late 1800s. I went to an exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Arts a few weeks ago and saw originals from the time by Toulouse-Lautrec, Alphonse Mucha, Jules Chéret and Pierre Bonnard. I particularly loved the Bonnard and Chéret works.

I really responded to the very hand-drawn look... flat and anti-slick. Figured I'd try my hand at creating my own poster for Dribble Funk.

THE WEIGHT OF WHAT WASN'T TO BE

I'm working on a series of illustrations based on the plays of Samuel Beckett (1906-1989). I just finished a new one.

This piece is my take on the play KRAPP'S LAST TAPE (1958). It is Krapp's 69th birthday and he hauls out his old tape recorder, reviews one of the earlier years – the recording he made when he was 39 – and makes a new recording commenting on the last 12 months. With ruthless economy, Beckett captures the weight of what wasn't to be. Besides the love and loss, there's much wry amusement in the exploration of a character at different stages of his life.

This is one of four planned pieces in the series.

Get a print of your own for as low as $15 at SOCIETY 6. 

Drawing Robots and Werewolves

 

I got a stack of packaging cardboard at work and figured I'd try it out to do some ink drawings on. I like the look of the black ink on the brown paper, but the cardboard is hard to draw on. The nib keeps catching and the ink absorbs into the texture of the surface in weird ways.

[click on image to see larger]