BRAD McENTIRE

Aug 14, 2012

Considerations for the Solo Performer

I might be doing a workshop in the near future called "Considerations of the Solo Performer." As such, I've been doing a good amount of note-taking as I think about, well, what these considerations should be.

Since solo performance is so idiosyncratic and approaches are so individual, I don't wanna lean too much on techniques, but instead explore larger concepts and notions. I wanna talk about the reasoning behind solo performance.

Here's some of the rough notions that have been jumping around in my brain. These are just my kooky little opinions and not, in any way, gospel from the mount...

1.) Create the show you wanna see. It goes past the usual, and sometimes narcissistic, reason many solo performers put together one-person shows. There are a lot of autobiographical, confessional solo shows. Nothing wrong with this, except it is now a well-worn path and it is hard to differentiate one of these shows from another (How I grew up gay, How I survived some job, I was a mix of two cultures [insert whatever culture/ethnicity here], How I was spiritually awakened by some experience, etc.). The only real differentiation is one of novelty and detail.

Listen, I'm not saying this content is bad. I'm not making any value judgement whatsoever. It is just, go to any fringe festival and you'll see, it has become old hat by now. Maybe it is a thing to start out from, as a beginner, and then grow past.

My challenge/solution is, instead of creating from what you know (like a writer being told "write what you know"), create with the goal of what you would wanna see on stage if you were watching it. What would you, as an audience member, be completely amazed to experience? This keeps the focus outward instead of inward. This approach also widens the imagination beyond real-life events. The shows, the creations, can become more imaginative.

I personally value a kick-ass story, virtuosity of ideas, twisty endings, big distinct characterizations and a highly theatrical performance. This is what I put into my solo shows. Or try to.

Anything Is Possible

Doodle project while I surf the web today. I might make this into a print...

Here's where I got the inspiration...

Aug 12, 2012

Like Dreams Taken Through a Straw

He believes that if a song “really wants to be written down, it’ll stick in my head. If it wasn’t interesting enough for me to remember it, well, it can just move along and go get in someone else’s song.” “Some songs,” he has learned, “don’t want to be recorded.” You can’t wrestle with them or you’ll only scare them off more. Trying to capture them sometimes “is trying to trap birds.” Fortunately, he says, other songs come easy, like “digging potatoes out of the ground.” Others are sticky and weird, like “gum found under an old table.” Clumsy and uncooperative songs may only be useful “to cut up as bait and use ‘em to catch other songs.” Of course, the best songs of all are those that enter you “like dreams taken through a straw.’ In those moments, all you can be, Waits says, is grateful.

The above quote is from a kick-ass 2002 profile of Tom Waits by Elizabeth Gilbert called "Play it Like Your Hair's On Fire" for GQ. Waits discusses, among other topics, where ideas for his songs come from. Read the quote above again and sub in the word play for song and you get a notion of how I get ideas for plays.

Read the article... HERE.

Aug 9, 2012

Wilder on liquor

INTERVIEWER

One of your most celebrated colleagues said recently that about all a writer really needs is a place to work, tobacco, some food, and good whiskey. Could you explain to the nondrinkers among us how liquor helps things along?

WILDER

Many writers have told me that they have built up mnemonic devices to start them off on each day’s writing task. Hemingway once told me he sharpened twenty pencils; Willa Cather that she read a passage from the Bible (not from piety, she was quick to add, but to get in touch with fine prose; she also regretted that she had formed this habit, for the prose rhythms of 1611 were not those she was in search of). My springboard has always been long walks. I drink a great deal, but I do not associate it with writing.

Thorton Wilder is one of my heroes. Maybe not on the top tier with Brook, Beckett and Schulz, nevertheless he has had an implicit influence on me and my work. OUR TOWN is an endlessly explore-able play. The use of an empty space, the structure, the archetypes that stand in for characters and so on.

Above is a snippet from an interview from an old Paris Review (Winter 1956). I love his response: "I drink a great deal, but I do not associate it with writing."

Read the whole thing HERE.