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| Brad McEntire [photo credit: Cornelius J. Wonderblett] |
Kitsch with Significance
Theatre maker Brad McEntire is figuring it out.
By F. Thomas Bonnigan - September 28, 2013
A conversation with Brad McEntire can be a multifaceted
affair. One of the first things you notice about him is that he likes to talk. And
though his topics range all over the map (Nikola Tesla, Texas Independence,
YouTube, and so much more) what he always seems to come back to is what he
likes to talk about more than anything. He talks about theatre. And let me tell
you, this guy has thoughts on all sorts of aspects of the theatre.
We are sitting on the back patio of a mom-and-pop Mexican restaurant
in Dallas. McEntire is a large man with broad shoulders. He has small
almond-shaped eyes and a wide face. He talks with his hands. Despite his stocky appearance, he moves with an elegant fluidity. He becomes very animated with an
edge of excitement in his voice when he gets off on a tear.
His speech pattern is a staccato rapid-fire stream of ideas.
He speaks in unexpected patterns, sometimes peppering in hiccups of ums and uhs, sometimes sprinkling in big SAT vocabulary words alongside
“awesome” and “sucks.” Sometimes he repeats himself. Occasionally he’ll stop suddenly, gather his thoughts,
and then launch back into what he was saying.
He is on his second beer. He nurses his beers. I’m on my
fourth. When I ask him about it, he says it is a habit that he’s developed from
being “light in the wallet.”
He holds a cigar between his thumb and finger in his right
hand. He takes deep draws from it and lets the smoke drift out of his mouth in
a thick cloud. He enjoys his cigars and that is why we are out on the back
patio. He likes patios. He dislikes that there are so few places to smoke
nowadays. He particularly dislikes how he is sometimes treated as a cigar
smoker by non-smokers.
“People are sometimes extremely rude to cigar smokers. There
is seldom a polite ‘would you mind?’ as much as they look at me like I impale
baby heads on spikes.”
McEntire, 38, has had a productive year. His original
commission for Denton’s Sundown Collaborative Theatre, CARTER STUBBS TAKES
FLIGHT, premiered in April. It played to mostly good reviews both at Denton’s
Green Space Dance Studio and at the Margo Jones Theatre in Dallas’s Fair Park.
McEntire wrote the play especially for the small theatre
group, having company members offer suggestions by way of objects, text and
images in a big bag. He then drew them out and discussed each item with the
whole group. He took notes. He looked for common themes and arresting images. The
end result was a play about an office drone who is given a rocket pack by a
dying friend. He flies off to a Micronesian island and ends up fighting a
tiger.
Rockets, tigers, mundane office culture - these are the building
blocks of McEntire’s plays. They are often as weird and haunting as they are hilarious. Earlier this summer he debuted DINOSAUR AND ROBOT
STOP A TRAIN. This fanciful piece follows how the two time-traveling main
characters supposedly saved a small child from a speeding train. The piece was presented as a press
conference. The premise being that the dinosaur and the robot addressed the
audience who were, of course, obviously there to hear what they had to say. McEntire’s
longtime collaborator Jeff Swearingen played the Dinosaur to McEntire’s Robot.
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| McEntire and Swearingen in DINOSAUR AND ROBOT STOP A TRAIN |
His solo show CHOP concerns an emotionally lost man
stumbling into an underground amputation fetish group.
His 2004 play FOR THE LOVE OF AN ANESTHESIOLOGIST has a
cross-gender waitress, a sword fight and a Tiki-inspired café set in purgatory.
A reviewer for the Dallas Observer wrote " [In] 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."
He is writing a short one-woman piece for a local actress
that concerns her adopting a chupacabra and his piece RUDNICK THE CANDLE-HEADED
BOY, an absurd retelling of the Rudolph story, will be included in a collection
of holiday-themed one-acts in December.
He is in the midst of rehearsals for a one-act he wrote and
is now directing called RASPBERRY FIZZ. He is taking it to the Houston Fringe
Festival. It premiered last year at a local festival in nearby Addison, Texas.
This will be McEntire’s third appearance at the Houston Fringe in as many
years.
He is working with two young actors, named Travis and
Tashina. Both are hard-workers and came in knowing their lines by the second
rehearsal. McEntire, who also acts in the piece in a small role, has yet to get
off book. The piece opens in a week.
It is fascinating to watch him switch back and forth from
the acting to directing. As a director he watches very closely and then gives
notes at the end of a section. The actors are still adapting to his ways of
working. He admits he has not been in a traditional rehearsal process as a
director in a long time and he is reflective of how his approach has changed
over the nearly twenty years he’s been directing.
“At first I was very detail-oriented and precise. I’d lead
the actors through scenes and zero in on the strongest choices and then almost
choreograph and micro-manage those decisions. I find nowadays that I have a
greater interest in spontaneity and flexibility. I’ve eased up on the precision in
favor of freshness and energy. I suppose I’ll eventually come back to a middle way between
the two approaches.”
Travis and Tashina are enthusiastic and diligent, two qualities McEntire looks for in actors. He
wants the process to be fun as well as demanding. They are just catching on
that McEntire has some definite thoughts on some parts of the production and
then just lets things unspool for a while to see what will happen on other
parts. He says things like, “Well, that’s heading in a nice direction, but just
try it a bunch of different ways. No
need to make decisions right now.”
McEntire is aware of how he comes across. This swing back
and forth between exactness and spontaneity, he admits, can be disconcerting
for traditionally trained actors.
When asked about his directing methods, one actress
noted,”You can tell he has theatre training, but that improv thing bubbles up a
lot.”
In RASPBERRY FIZZ, McEntire plays a mysterious carnival
barker who has set up a record player on a street corner a little ways down
from where a young adolescent is trying to work up the nerve to ask a girl at his school out to a dance. Without the Barker, the play would be a
straight-forward two-hander, the kind two actual students might do as a scene in an acting class. It would be a sweet little coming-of-age scene between two
young people, but nothing unique. The Barker adds both thematic underpinning and a small dose of
weirdness. His presence is never explained. The character comes off as funny,
but also a little threatening. And mysterious. He is an outsider in a play about two characters who already feel like misfits.
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| McEntire as The Barker in RASPBERRY FIZZ |
“I seem to be drawn towards misfits who are looking for
something,” states McEntire.
Indeed, if his style of theatre had a label it might be Kitsch With Significance. With each
succeeding piece he pulls in even weirder elements – strange machines and
beasts of yore - and does his best to imbue the content with important thematic
weight.
“I dig retro novelty, but I want to make it something more
than just fluff. I want the work to be universal and important. But still, you
know, funny. Like the way Louis
Armstrong sang fluffy little pop songs and made them classics…”
Indeed, jazz legend Armstrong was known for raising lesser
songs such as “It’s a Wonderful World” to the level of timeless by his unique
delivery and musicality.
In November, McEntire will mount RASPBERRY FIZZ in Dallas. Under the
banner of his scrappy little company Audacity Theatre Lab. It will play at the
Margo Jones Theatre in Fair Park.
A more fitting analogy could be found with Carlo Goldoni,
the great Venetian dramatist who renovated the commedia dell'arte form in the
1700s by replacing its masked stock figures with realistic characters, its
repetitive action with tightly constructed plots and its predictable farce with narrative spontaneity. Goldoni blended the high and the low to create a new approach to
drama. McEntire seems to be attempting a similar sort of thing in his own way.
McEntire’s main artistic home is his small theatre
collective Audacity. Like McEntire himself, the group has an
original approach. It doesn’t operate the way most non-profit theatres operate. It is almost militantly artist-centric. It has no set season, no subscription system, no set aesthetic and
until recently had so set venue. This past summer the group was invited to be
one of a handful of companies to use the historic Margo Jones Theatre in Fair
Park.
“We are pretty excited about it, actually. It means we can
do more projects in town,” McEntire says.
McEntire has adapted his small group into a stream-lined
little machine over the past several years. All the productions are original
and created in-house by the artists involved. Most shows are bare-bones with
small casts, sometimes one person, and are taken around the country to multiple venues and
festivals. They often play for audiences numbering between maybe a dozen and forty people.
McEntire says he doesn’t mind the small crowds. “We don’t
necessarily do big shows. We know this. We do smaller, more intimate projects. Those that like our stuff
are welcome. There are other theatres doing other stuff, maybe larger-in-scope, for everyone else.”
His solo show CHOP premiered in Addison at the Water Tower
Theatre’s Out of the Loop Festival in 2010 and has since traveled to over a
dozen different venues and cities, including Seattle, Phoenix, Santa Fe, New York and New Orleans. He’ll take it back to New Orleans in
November for a solo performance festival there.
“CHOP is great fun. Ruth (Engel-McEntire, his wife) runs the
tech. I perform. We're a team. It is a great excuse for us to travel and meet other theatre people
around the country.”
McEntire and his wife since February of 2012, Ruth, actually do travel a
great deal. They met in Grad school at Texas Woman’s University. He was
studying playwriting and she directing. They both ended up in Hong Kong after
graduation working for the same company.
“We were teaching ESL to Chinese high schoolers using drama
games. It was stressful, but really fun. We met some great people, other
expats, and of course, we traveled a lot.”
They went to Macau and Bangkok and Nepal. On the way back to
the States they meandered through Europe staying with friends and alternating
between inexpensive youth hostels and more novel high end accommodations.
“We stayed in a castle one night in Ireland. We crashed a
wedding reception in one of the ballrooms. The night before we were in a youth hostel on bunk beds, sharing a room with fourteen other people.”
Ruth is a tall blond who smiles a lot. When she looks at and
listens to her husband her eyes gleam with a mix of maternal care, amusement and pride.
McEntire teases her a great deal, but admits that her support is essential.
“She’s more than just my wife and friend, she genuinely
believes in me. She is critical and harsh sometimes, but supportive. She’s like my closest patron.”
McEntire admits that he is a late-bloomer. Though he has
been creating theatre for some time he feels he has just recently come into his
own. Only in the last several years has he gained real confidence in his own
work.
“I’m not shy about putting my name on everything I make now.
Each project was kind of hit or miss for a long time as I figured a lot of things out. And as I was in the process of getting better. I’d act in things or direct something
that I’d have trepidations about inviting people out to see.”
“Plus,” he adds, “I am generating and performing my own stuff now. A lot of the shows I was involved in either had me on stage as an actor for someone else's vision or had me behind the scenes with my own projects, producing and directing plays while the actors or playwrights I worked with profited from the exposure. I just really kind of helped a bunch of
others rise through the ranks.”
Indeed, one of his longtime collaborators, Jeff Swearingen
has been hailed as one of the funniest actors in Dallas. Swearingen has gone on to win awards and start his
own theatre, Fun House Theatre and Film, where he works with young actors. He started out with McEntire over a
decade ago and became a sort of protége. He ended up cutting his teeth for years in a variety of unusual roles under
McEntire’s direction.
“Swearingen is great. We've grown up alongside each other. He’s like an artistic little brother.”
Swearingen and McEntire perform together as an improv duo. They call themselves Fun Grip. They only perform occasionally, but "we usually have a good time. And the audience does, too."
McEntire himself is no stranger to improv. A student of comedy whose interests range from European clowning to subversive and experiemental cabaret, he has produced and performed in a handful of sketch and improv groups. In 2005 he began performing longform solo improvisations, experimenting with a format he ultimately called Dribble Funk. It is a hybrid performance piece that draws on storytelling, improv and traditional theatre. In celebration of his 38th birthday, earlier this month, he performed a 380 minute Dribble Funk.
"Yeah, I was alone on stage making up a continuous story filled with distinct characters for six hours and twenty minutes."
I ask him if he was nervous about such an undertaking. "Yes," he responds, "I was scared to death. But that was the reason to do it. I didn't want to end up like some sort of theatre equivalent of a high school quarterback, you know, with my best days behind me."
He looks directly at me. "Gotta walk out on the edge every so often and peer over."
McEntire himself is no stranger to improv. A student of comedy whose interests range from European clowning to subversive and experiemental cabaret, he has produced and performed in a handful of sketch and improv groups. In 2005 he began performing longform solo improvisations, experimenting with a format he ultimately called Dribble Funk. It is a hybrid performance piece that draws on storytelling, improv and traditional theatre. In celebration of his 38th birthday, earlier this month, he performed a 380 minute Dribble Funk.
"Yeah, I was alone on stage making up a continuous story filled with distinct characters for six hours and twenty minutes."
I ask him if he was nervous about such an undertaking. "Yes," he responds, "I was scared to death. But that was the reason to do it. I didn't want to end up like some sort of theatre equivalent of a high school quarterback, you know, with my best days behind me."
He looks directly at me. "Gotta walk out on the edge every so often and peer over."
The bill comes. The empty beer glasses are taken away. McEntire
finishes off his cigar and sets it in the ash tray.
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