CHUPACABRA RIGHTS at Dallas 1MPF

With fellow playwright Samantha Rios, 1MPF founder Dominic D'Andrea,
and actors Mayam Baig and Travis Stuebing at the Dallas One-Minute Play Festival

Below is a fuzzy pic of one of my pieces in in performance at the 1st Dallas One-Minute Play Festival at Kitchen Dog Theater, CHUPACABRA RIGHTS. 

The 1MPF played August 16-18, 2014 at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary, sponsored by Kitchen Dog Theater. I had two pieces in the production. Dylan Key, of the Undermain, directed my play I HATE IT HERE and CHUPACABRA RIGHTS featured the excellent Danielle Pickard and Danielle Georgiou and was directed by Second Thought Theatre's Kelsey Head.

Danielle Georgiou and Danielle Pickard in CHUPACABRA RIGHTS

The Danielles: Pickard and Georgiou

In reflection, I observed a few things about this unique event: 

1.) It was wonderful to get such a large and diverse swath of the Dallas theatre community together in one big project. Besides seeing a bunch of old friends and dear colleagues, I made some new friends and contacts as well. The scope of the project was a great bringing-together.

2.) I definitely saw the "specific to the community" angle that the founder of the 1MPF concept, Dominic D'Andrea, was shooting for. The plays were purposelfully a cross-section of the interests and concerns of Dallas. They were furthermore grouped into roughly similar themes such as racial issues, gender/sexual awareness, dense traffic, dependenace on technology, Texas pride and so on.

3.) Though I liked being part of the "community" I think it also took a little something away from the individuality of the plays and playwrights involved. Instead of a collection of individual voices, what came out was a jumbled mass of coincidently intersecting "bits." I guess a better way to say it would be that the pieces were plugged into the service of the project, instead of the project serving the voices of the individual writers. This was not necessarily a fault so much as the nature of the beast (all the plays are one-minute long, for goodness sake), but it was definitely noticeable. As an experiment and collective project it was beneficial to participate in, but it runs counter to my own m.o., so definitely not something to engage in very often.

I'm printing CHUPACABRA RIGHTS below. I added "presumeably male" in the opening directions, since I guess it wasn't clear before, particularly after seeing how the piece was presented at KDT. The director took an interesting angle with the piece, by flipping the genders and putting in a bit of interesting blocking (they are sitting in front of chairs). Not completely sure why, but it actually seemed to come out a-okay.

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CHUPACABRA  RIGHTS

By Brad McEntire © 2014

Lights up. Two, presumeably male, Chupacabras stand facing the audience. We know they are Chupacabras because they probably have little cardboard signs on them that say, simply, “Chupacabra.” At rise A YOUNG LADY kisses CHUPA 1 on the cheek and exits.

CHUPA 1

Cute right? I’m going to marry her.

CHUPA 2

You can’t marry her. You don’t have the right. You’re not a citizen here.

CHUPA 1

So?

CHUPA 2

You aren’t even human. You don’t have the right.

CHUPA 1

I don’t see the problem. The Supreme Court says corporations have rights, like people. Why not us?

Nice little beat.

… Besides I love her.

Lights fade. End.