New website for Playwriting Endeavors

 See it at:

Bradmcentireplays

Directing two student-written short plays

Me "directing" [credit Josh Niccolai-Belfi/ TCC-SE]

I am an adjunct instructor at a small community college in north Texas. I originally was drawn to the job because I liked teaching at the college level. Since maybe a year or so before the pandemic, I have found myself directing a lot more at the college than teaching classes, which is not altogether my preferred course. Last week, two student-written 10-minute plays, complete with student actors and crew, which I directed, saw the light of day. The plays I directed for this year's Festival of New Plays included Blake Roper's The Friendship Application and DaShaun Ellis' I'm Thinking. They were both fun little playlets to work on. The playwrights were receptive to feedback and the student actors, mostly, put forth the effort.

The Friendship Application is set a hundred years in the future when civilization has become interplanetary. The government now matches people together as friends, provided one fills out the paperwork properly.

I'm Thinking was a fun little sketch about a student hung up on a writing assignment. His little sister and her friend step in and help by reading out loud from his wadded up attempts. They played at being pirates and cowboys and even do a stand-off, one as a mad scientist and the other as a secret agent. Eventually, an idea is sparked and the student can finish the assignment.

The Festival of New Plays ran February 22 - 24, 2023 in a small black box space at the college.

Student actors Madison Sanchez, Ethan Melendez and
Haleigh Ferguson in I'm Thinking, written by DaShaun Ellis
[credit: Josh Niccolai-Belfi/ TCC-SE]

Student actors Ethan Melendez and DaShaun Ellis in
The Friendship Application, written by Blake Roper
[credit: Josh Niccolai-Belfi/ TCC-SE]

Student actors Lina Koudy and DaShaun Ellis in The Friendship
Application, written by Blake Roper [credit: Josh Niccolai-Belfi/ TCC-SE]

#   #   #

Perhaps you would be interested in adding more excitement and romance, adventure and intrigue to your life. If that's the case, I don't know what to tell you. But I would suggest you subscribe to my newsletter. I mean, who knows? Life is full of surprises. I only send stuff out occasionally, but it is good stuff. Hit the button below...

I have launched a new webcomic

I just launched a brand new-old webcomic. Let me 'splain...

Back in the late 1990s when I was a young and impressionable college student. I became enthralled with trying to create a sort of minimalist comic. The idea was not to have to draw the comic from scratch each time. The idea, instead, was that I would just need to update the word balloons. That is to say, I wanted to change what the characters say (the dialogue), not how the actual comics look (the art). Then I thought it would be neat if you removed characters altogether. What you might get would be a sort of anti-comic.

So, I came up with J. Herbin. Here was a character who was simply a passive observer in his own strip. It would have little to no movement or action. The dialogue would come in from out-of-frame. We, the readers, are overhearing an off-frame snippet of conversation just as Herbin is in the comic. I came at it as this little experiment. Would such a strip even be interesting? Could I still make it weird? Or even, occasionally, funny?

Since I had just graduated from college (where I had been a cartoonist for the school paper) and the internet hadn't really picked up momentum yet, I did not have an outlet for the idea at the time. My original J. Herbin comics only lasted a short while. I ended up putting it in a drawer and kind of forgot about it. 

I later learned about David Lynch's The Angriest Dog in the World and Max Cannon's strip Red Meat. I thought, "Hey, other people, much more well-known than me, have done this sort of thing. There might be something to this idea."

Over the last few years, while the zeitgeist kind of centered on questions of connection and isolation, I started thinking about this little minimalist anti-comic idea once again. I put it on my list for projects to launch in the new year and now, well, its here!

The first two new J. Herbin comics are up and ready to read on the brand-new website... HERE

I hope, if you are reading this, that you'll follow along each week and check out this little project. I am oddly excited about it.

An old J. Herbin comic from back in the day.

#   #   #

Perhaps you would be interested in adding more excitement and romance, adventure and intrigue to your life. If that's the case, I don't know what to tell you. But I would suggest you subscribe to my newsletter. I mean, who knows? Life is full of surprises. I only send stuff out occasionally, but it is good stuff. Hit the button below...

Leave a comment. If you are a robot or a blatant marketer trolling Blogger, then you will be deleted. Humans only, please.

Petey Gale Goes Up and Beyond now on Amazon kindle

In 1593 and 1594, when the theatres in London were closed because of the plague. Actor and playwright William Shakespeare found himself without an outlet for his usual livelihood. So, he turned to writing straight up poetry. He turned out two epic poems (on commission): Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.

During the bulk of 2021 while fringe fests and other theatre venues were closed due to the pandemic, I found myself in the same sort of situation as ole Shakespeare. So, I created a children's picture book for my son. I published the book as a paperback early last year. I titled it Petey Gale Goes Up and Beyond. It is about adventure and friendship. 

Here's a blurb: 

Petey Gale's friend Walter is one sad T-Rex. Petey has a plan to cheer him up and it involves a rare fruit in a far away land. This is a delightful tale of a friend helping a friend by heading off on an adventure to the far side of the globe on a hot air balloon.

Just recently, a year after the paperback was released, I have now put out a kindle ebook version. If you have a young one in your world, consider grabbing a copy.

Get the kindle version... HERE

#   #   #

Perhaps you would be interested in adding more excitement and romance, adventure and intrigue to your life. If that's the case, I don't know what to tell you. But I would suggest you subscribe to my newsletter. I mean, who knows? Life is full of surprises. I only send stuff out on occasion, but it is good stuff. Hit the button below...

Leave a comment. If you are a robot or a blatant marketer trolling Blogger, then you will be deleted. Humans only, please.

Looking Back at 2022

Over the last decade or so I have also been doing a year-in-review here on the website to take stock of the past year (for those even mildly curious, here is 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021). 2022 was the first year since the Covid-19 pandemic hit that the world seemed like it returned to a new sort of "normal." By this I mean theatres and festivals began to open once more (though audience numbers are still pretty low), people could meet face to face to socialize and plan projects again and things like shopping, dining and working out didn't feel so much like stepping into the Twilight Zone. Here’s the rundown of what I was up to in 2022...

Nothing really got going until the spring. In April I directed an evening of four David Ives one-acts, collectively entitled All In The Timing at the college I teach at. This project was one of the things cancelled back in the Spring of 2020. At that time, I was a co-director responsible for two plays. When it finally got around to being produced, I had the whole bill. This was the first in-person directing I had done in a long while and with students who had been taking online classes for the previous few years. It was rough. The plays didn't turn out bad, let's just say I was glad to have it over with.

A student actor in Variations on the Death of Trotsky by David Ives.

Words, Words, Words by David Ives

In March I teamed back up with my friend Jeff Swearingen and we put out long-form improv duo Fun Grip back together. We had been on a hiatus since 2014. We started doing regular gigs once or twice a month at the Dallas Comedy Club down in the Deep Ellum neighborhood adjacent to downtown Dallas. There was a few rough patches at the beginning to get my sea-legs back under me, but within a few weeks, I was enjoying improv again. Jeff and I slowly got better and better. We still have a ways to go to consistently tell a coherent story on stage and hit all the character beats and laugh lines, but we are still making progress.

In early July Fun Grip played as one of the Saturday night headliners at the 2022 Big Weekend of Improv Festival, produced by the Alternative Comedy Theater. That was fun, since the fest had troupes in from all over the country.

Fun Grip at the Addison Theatre Center as part of the 2022 Big Weekend of Improv

I managed to travel out to more fringe festivals finally. In late June I drove out to Denver for the Denver Fringe Festival. It was a unique fest. They had started it during the pandemic, so this past summer was the first time they held it as a live event at multiple venues. I performed in the back events room at the Blue Moon Brewery. It was great to travel again and to perform my show Robert's Eternal Goldfish for new audiences. If you are curious about how the experience was for me, listen to episode 32 of the Cultivated Playwright Podcast.

At the Denver Fringe

The end of the summer saw me at another fringe, this time closer to home. I performed Robert's Eternal Goldfish again for a long weekend at the Ft. Worth Fringe Festival in mid-September. Again, audiences were low, but to those that came out, a good time was had by all. in a review that ran, I was called "funny and booming." I did a debriefing about this festival experience also on the Cultivated Playwright Podcast. Listen to episode 33 for the rundown.

My kiddo came out to see the show in Ft. Worth (I cleaned the language up for that one).

My teaching career continued to go down hill with attendance numbers at the college being still super low (they were low before the pandemic, but now it looks like classes on campus might not make again for adjuncts for years). I taught high school-for-college students at a high school. I disliked it intensely.

Though I wasn't teaching on campus, I did direct there again. this time, I directed one of my own plays, Que Sera, Giant Monster. The experience was a breath of fresh air. the students were all enthusiastic and the design was amazing. My only regret was that it only showed for a single long weekend in November.

A big moment from Que Sera, Giant Monster.

Just before the end of the year I published an ebook version of the ten-minute holiday plays I wrote for Nouveau 47 Theatre between 2013 and 2017. A paperback version was released right after the new year.

 

Besides the usual creative endeavors, I also recorded 8 episodes of my podcast The Cultivated Playwright, including a very special remembrance of Sir Peter Brook, who passed on this past summer at the age of 97 (episode 35). I also adapted the transcript of that episode into a hefty essay on Brook and his immense influence on me as a theatre-maker.

I also posted several YouTube videos, in particular, on camping. I got to camp just a very few times last spring and this fall. This is something, I'm hoping to remedy next year.

I spent time with friends and family, saved a bit of money, took better care of my health and felt more gratitude this past year. I am starting to feel excitement again for what the future may hold, which is a welcome feeling after the last few years of relative creative inertia.

#   #   #

Perhaps you would be interested in adding more excitement and romance, adventure and intrigue to your life. If that's the case, I don't know what to tell you. But I would suggest you subscribe to my newsletter. I mean, who knows? Life is full of surprises. I only send stuff out occasionally, but it is good stuff. Hit the button below...

Leave a comment. If you are a robot or a blatant marketer trolling Blogger, then you will be deleted. Humans only, please.

I'm Teaching a Ten-Minute Play Workshop

 

 Writing the Ten-Minute Play...with Brad McEntire

Two Saturdays Jan 28th and Feb 4th
from 1- 4 pm
at 1106 Lupo Drive

1106 Lupo Dr
Dallas, TX 75207

MAP HERE

The Ten-Minute Play is a short burst of theatrical expressiveness. As theatres seek to either expand revenue streams or grow audiences or broaden their base of artistic contributors - especially as things get back up and moving after the last several years - 10-Minute play festivals have become more and more prevalent. In this fun introductory workshop, we'll explore the structure, characters and the "punch" of these short one-acts. Filled with tips, tricks, considerations... plus, we'll do a little writing to boot. 

This workshop is open to experienced playwrights, newcomers or simply the waywardly curious.

 

Brad McEntire works as a playwright, director and solo performer. His plays over the last twenty years have been produced and developed at venues and festivals around North America. He is the Artistic Director of Audacity Theatre Lab based in Dallas, Texas.


Class Fee - $150
Class size is limited to 8

Call 214-630-7722 after the first of the year or email lisahtx@gmail.com

#   #   #

Perhaps you would be interested in adding more excitement and romance, adventure and intrigue to your life. If that's the case, I don't know what to tell you. But I would suggest you subscribe to my newsletter. I mean, who knows? Life is full of surprises. I only send stuff out occasionally, but it is good stuff. Hit the button below...

Leave a comment. If you are a robot or a blatant marketer trolling Blogger, then you will be gleefully deleted. Humans only, please.