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Audacity Productions serves up a new dish

Comments (0) By Annabelle Massey Helber Thursday, May 20 2004

Hyphenation of related modifiers is just another trick of the playwrighting trade for Brad McEntire, artistic director of Audacity Productions and its offbeat offshoot, Mild Dementia. "Somebody called us anarcho-theatricalists, and that stuck," McEntire says. Audacity supports a small, nonprofit group of stage writers, directors and performers in Dallas, while Mild Dementia employs some of the same multi-sarcastic players as a comedy troupe.

Brad McEntire

"Burden of a Light Blue Shirt"

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Single Servings runs Wednesday through Sunday, May 29, at the Bath House Cultural Center, 521 E. Lawther Drive. Tickets are $10 and $12. For reservations and showtimes, call 214-731-8650.

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"There's humor in everything we do, regardless," McEntire says. He describes Audacity's latest offering, a quadro-frenetic group of short plays called Single Servings, as ranging from "really fall-down funny to bizarre and hysterical." Well, that's enough for us quasi-motivated, occasional play-goers.

"These four performance pieces explore love, loss and other revelations in a really funny, moving way," McEntire says. The pieces are short enough (10 to 30 minutes each) to group together for one interesting evening.

McEntire wrote "Burden of a Light Blue Shirt," which is performed by Jeff Swearingen, who recounts how his "trinket" from a would-be affair leaves him with a "strange cross to bear." Rasa Hollender performs as a woman on safari confronting an elephant in "The Great One," written by Greg Romero. "Grading on a Curve," written by A.V. Philbes and performed by Jamie Marchi, is an odd tale McEntire uses more hyphenation to explain. "It's about the apathetic love between a misanthropic ectro-dactylic (lobster claws for hands) and a bored, starving-by-choice artist with cannibalistic tendencies."

The final piece, "The Smartest Man in the Whole Damn World," is the brainchild of five independent writers who were given the topic and asked to contribute dialogue and concepts. The wacky, stream-of-consciousness, free-form piece, McEntire says, came from the pens/keyboards of Chris Alonzo, Brooklyn, New York; Cindy Brown-Melton, Quincy, Illinois; Josh Nanninga, Plano; Jason Rice, Carrollton; and Tim Shane, Richardson. This piece was Audacity's entry into Austin's "FronteraFest" of independent theater productions.