CHOP - NOTES

About the Play

The Out of the Loop Fringe Festival will be the World Premiere of CHOP. As a local playwright, it is important to me to try to premiere my plays in Texas if at all possible. The piece received a staged reading by Outsider's Inn Collective in Seattle in October of 2008. It was workshopped by NYC's Cry Havoc in March of 2009. This workshop was directed by New York director Andy Merkel and performed by William Jaskson Harper (ex-Dallasite, friend, and actor in the Lynne Nottage's Pulitzer Prize winning RUINED). Andy Merkel will direct me, the playwright Brad McEntire in this Out of the Loop production of the play. The piece grew out of two aspects of my life. First, the character and story are partly pulled from a previous abandoned play (my Thesis play for grad school at Texas Woman's University). Second, in 2006-2007 I lived and worked in Hong Kong. The experience of being a stranger in a strange land led me back to the piece and my feelings of isolation, distance and seperateness during my overseas travels show up thematically in the work. The first draft was completed in Hong Kong in summer of 2007, shortly before I came back to the States. CHOP has been accepted into the 2nd Annual Phoenix Fringe Festival in Arizona in April, 2010. That's its next stop after Out of the Loop. ~BDM

About the Playwright

Scott Osborne of OETC describes Brad McEntire thus: "Hell on wheels buffoonery at its finest. Comic relief amidst all this heady seriousness. Unpredictable. Give him free reign absolutely. Rehearse. Pause. What did he just do?! Holy crap man that guy is the real deal. The longest dance ever performed. Is he dead yet?"

McEntire is a native-born Texan and works predominantly as a playwright, director, puppeteer and improviser. He is the founding Artistic Director of Audacity Theatre Lab (formerly Audacity Productions) based in Dallas, Texas. His works have been produced/developed by Austin’s FronteraFest at Hyde Park Theatre, The Mind Over Money Theatrical Festival, Expanded Arts NYC, Reverie Productions at Walkerspace Theatre (New York), New York’s Square Peg Collective, The New York International Theatre Festival, Alleyway Theatre, DEER Theatre (Hong Kong), Le Rideau Theatre Café, Audacity Productions, Rover Dramawerks, Bobbindoctrin Puppet Theatre, Texas WordSpace and Plano Childrens Theatre. His plays include CHOP, RUDNICK THE CANDLE-HEADED BOY, A TALL TALE OF TEXAS, THE ANGEL IN THE BARN, I HAVE ANGERED A GREAT GOD as well as FOR THE LOVE OF AN ANESTHESIOLOGIST and ARSENIC & ROSES which comprise his first published collection Two Plays (And Some Sketches) By Brad McEntire. Mr. McEntire currently serves as the Literary Manager of Dallas’ Undermain Theatre, a teaching artist for both Junior Players and Plano Childrens Theatre and is a semi-active member of the DFW Playwrights’ Alliance, UNIMA-USA and The Playwrights Center of Minneapolis. Brad is one of a handful of pioneering performers in the sub-arcana of solo improvisation (there are only maybe a dozen or so practitioners in the United States). He is also the creator of the original solo improv story format Dribble Funk. For more information visit: www.dribblefunk.com

For more information on Brad McEntire click here.

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