There’s a theater series in downtown Seattle in which rehearsal is overrated, budgets are nil, and the campiest acting style imaginable reigns supreme.
The Brown Derby Series, started in 1999 by Ian Bell, features a mix of professional actors, comedians, and drag queens performing staged readings of classic movies, reimagined in a wacky, slapdash style all its own. The audience at favorite local haunt Re-bar is populated with movie buffs, but for the most part regulars come to marvel at how the performers pull off, say, re-enacting every dinosaur chase scene in “Jurassic Park” on a bare stage.
“There are things film can do that stage can’t,” says Bell. “That’s part of the fun; it’s a bit like a train wreck.... How is this actor going to play this, achieve this suspense or those special effects, with cardboard, duct tape, and silly string?
“Silly string is the new glitter,” he adds. “I use it for everything.”
Drawn to Seattle from New York City for its more accessible theater production scene, Bell initially started toying with the idea of staging old movies during an obsession with “Valley of the Dolls.” He found himself recasting the film’s roles with his more outlandish actor friends. After hearing about drag legend Jackie Beat’s salon readings of film scripts, he decided to cobble together a script and some collaborators in what he calls a “very bare-bones type thing. We rehearsed maybe twice. Not a lot of editing.”
As off-the-cuff improvisations and unusual casting increasingly became the series’ focus, Bell realized the crowd was turning up just to see individual performers’ takes on iconic roles. “It’s almost like a sing-along,” he says. “The whole magic is the audience is just as invested in what’s happening as the actors; the stakes are high for both. Everyone knows the films we do, what’s going to happen, how it ends, the classic lines. That’s really important, actually, because I want them to focus on what the actor is doing.... It’s now become its own sort of creature.”
The creature has expanded into music, including Prince’s “Purple Rain” and R. Kelly’s “Trapped in the Closet.” Such irreverent performances run on meta-theatrical campiness, the broadest of performance styles. “It shares a lot with the Theatre of the Ridiculous,” Bell points out. “The difference between that and me is they really thought about it. [Here] there’s more of a punk-rock aesthetic to it. There has to be an element of impossibility.”
It’s the impossibility that fires up Bell’s creative impulses. The challenges and conflicts in any script, he says, are where his artistic process begins. “And Brown Derby is all challenges and conflicts.” Rather than trying to compete with the escapist quality of film, Bell’s productions remind audiences they’re watching low-budget theater that’s entertainingly ill-equipped to re-create a polished experience.
Brown Derby is a microcosm of the downtown arts scene in which it was bred: informal and difficult to classify, but seriously funny. Bell says artists of all backgrounds and persuasions would benefit from such a distinctly welcoming community. “Seattle still behaves like a small town in some ways. It’s got this weird thing where it’s a big city but it doesn’t quite believe that yet. It can compartmentalize easily: the fringe crowd, the drag scene, regional [theater]. They all go to the bar after the show.”
His advice for artists traveling to the end of the rainbow in the Emerald City? “Take advantage of that small town–ness, but embrace the fact that it’s got a lot of variety.”
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