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For The Love of An Anesthesiologist
Absurd comedy is a real knockout
A tantalizing slice of artful hilarity premieres at a Dallas theater festival.
By Perry Stewart Special to the Star-Telegram - 7/20/2004
Perhaps For the Love of an Anesthesiologist will one day be presented as a companion play to The Tale of the Allergist's Wife. For the present, in its premiere run at the Festival of Independent Theatres, Brad McEntire's comedy shares the bill with two other one-act works that seem pedestrian alongside its artful absurdity.
A packed house had thinned noticeably Friday by the time Anesthesiologist, the last of the three that evening, took the stage at the Bath House Cultural Center. Audience members who left early missed the gem of the trio. (What's with these people? Do they leave baseball games after the sixth inning?)
Staged under the banner of the appropriately named Audacity Productions, McEntire's play introduces the fugitive Alfred -- portrayed with manic gusto by Jeff Swearingen, who looks like Emilio Estevez and sounds like a young Richard Dreyfuss on speed.
Alfred abides in a purgatorial way station where various people from his past parade by. Several are played by Kenneth Fulenwider, who has one encounter with Swearingen that's right out of Waiting for Godot.
Trista Wyly, who has delighted Hip Pocket Theatre and Pocket Sandwich Theatre audiences, is marvelous here as a kinky Eurotrash countess.
In the same festival performance block are:
Graceland, Ellen Byron's wistful comedy about two pathetically devoted Elvis Presley fans, presented by Beardsley Living Theatre. It's competently acted by Brenda Galgan and the endearingly waifish Samantha Chancellor. But it's muted without its frequent companion play, Asleep on the Wind. Ties, presented by Boaz Unlocked Productions. Writer/director Rebecca Finley follows fantasy-prone Meg (Rebecca Pense) and reality-based Ben (Stephen Tickner) from childhood sweethearthood to adult angst. Ambrosia Tuft's film segments are attractive, but they don't accomplish much except make the play longer.
Dallas Observer
July 22-28, 2004
STAGE: The Festival of Independent Theatres
By Andrea Grimes
Marathon play-going, walks on the beach and more community theatre buffs than you can shake a stick at can mean only one thing, and it's not a Christopher Guest film. It's the Festival of Independent Theatres at the Bath House Cultural Center. Showcasing local talent in rotating repertory style, FIT treats patrons to two or three short plays per sitting.
…
In Friday's Finale, 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 from Audacity Productions.
Alfred (Jeff Swearingen), an occasionally spastic man on the run, searches for meaning, an anesthesiologist (Maura Murphy) and his way out of an eerie island bar. Joining him are a transgendered cocktail waitress (Julie Reinegal), a man in a trench coat (Kenneth Fulenwider, who steals the show) and a pirate-like Parisian ex-lover (Trista Wyly).
Love shouldn't be missed. FIT runs through August 7 at the Bath House Cultural Center, 521 E. Lawther drive on White Rock lake. All plays reviewed above repeat at various times; see website for scheduling: www.bathhousecultural.com/fit2004.html. 214-670-8749.
Festival swings, misses
Saturday, July 17, 2004
By LAWSON TAITTE / The Dallas Morning News
The general malaise suffered over the first two nights of the sixth annual Festival of Independent Theatres at Bath House Cultural Center is at bottom a matter of scripts. Previous festivals have delighted us with some amazingly fresh and potent plays. So far this time around, most of the one-acts have been fairly entertaining, but there hasn't been a home run in the first six at-bats.
The second program, which debuted Friday, opened with the offering of one of the festival's host organizations, BLT/The Beardsley Living Theater: Graceland, by Ellen Byron. Its events take place a few days before Elvis Presley's Memphis home was opened to the public. Two die-hard fans squabble over which was first in line.
Brenda Galgan plays Bev, the middle-aged collector of Elvis memorabilia. (One of the show's best jokes is the use she makes of a foot-high statuette of the King.) Samantha Chancellor plays Rootie, a young wife trying to reclaim the lost innocence.
Under the direction of her husband, Michael Galgan, and Marilyn Kittelson, Ms. Galgan has a welcoming presence but doesn't create a very specific character. Ms. Chancellor has the more interesting role, and she finds a quirky edge to it.
The two other plays performed Friday were each written and directed by a member of the presenting company. Rebecca Finley's Ties for Boaz Unlocked Productions delineated the relationship of a couple from childhood friendship to troubled adult romance.
At first the play's live scenes seem diffuse. Suddenly, however, there gets to be way too much plot - and by the end we're not really sure of the truth of anything that happened, or whether anything happened at all outside the head of the female character. Rebecca Pense and Stephen Tickner project some glamour as the two characters, though their transitions from childhood to adulthood aren't always smooth.
Audacity Theatre Productions' For the Love of an Anesthesiologist provided some pleasant surprises - though that was partly because the company's previous work hadn't aroused very high expectations. Brad McEntire's script comes out of the same latter-day absurdist style that shapes Steve Martin's stage pieces.
A young man, Alfred (Jeff Swearingen), enters in a coffin, gets out and looks confused. We see flashbacks of his life; gradually we realize he's in an anteroom of the afterlife.
The play's subsequent events are preposterous but lively. The whole thing manages to be winning mostly because of Mr. Swearingen's charm and strong presence. Maura Murphy as his anesthesiologist fiancée and Julie Reinagel as an all-knowing waitress in the limbo-like tropical bar also stand out.
At the very least, the Audacity offering marked a huge improvement over its Thursday curtain-lowering predecessor.
Always the most adventurous of the companies represented in the festival, Core Performance Manufactory this year presented a one-man piece of performance art, Daisy Cutter by Kim Corbet. Mr. Corbet has been a leader of Dallas' musical avant-garde for decades. This piece refutes a line in the author-performer's explanatory notes that says "there are no real artistic boundaries."
In fact, this shallow and pretentious piece blurs the lines between documentary video and live theater, between music and noise, between silliness and serious politics, and leaves them all for the worse.
E-mail: ltaitte@dallasnews.com
The Festival of Independent Theatres, presented by the Bath House Cultural Center, 521 E. Lawther at Northcliff, through Aug. 7. Festival passes $45, individual tickets $5 to $15. Call TITAS at 214-528-5576. Go to www.bathhousecultural.com for schedule details.