Poor Boys’ Chorus
By Brian Kettler
Directed by Sean Tecson
A daring trick by a mysterious illusionist at the summer carnival inspires a rich girl to convince an orphan boy to break all of the town’s rules. The Poor Boys’ Chorus proudly presents a tale so tragically romantic it’ll take your breath away. Literally.
HISTORY
In 2006, Brian wrote a short play called Annabel + Steeds Make Tracks about a husband and wife detective team who are investigating missing children at a mysterious carnival for the National Theatre Institute's One-Act Original Play Festival. After the festival, Brian spent several years trying find a way to continue Annabel and Steeds’ story and expand it into a full-length play.
Six years later, in 2012, Brian is in his first semester of the MFA Playwriting Program at The University of Texas at Austin and is struggling to write something that feels personal or meaningful. Out of pure frustration he begins to write a new play with a few familiar characters: Annabel and Steeds, who are now teenagers in a small town just beginning to fall in love with each other. He also introduces a chorus of three boys who narrate the action and establish rhythms of the dialogue. The new play is titled Poor Boys’ Chorus. He drafts an opening ten-page scene that his professors mark as the most promising material he has written while in the program and encourage him to expand it into a full-length play.
The following year, Brian teamed up with Natalie Novacek, an MFA Directing Candidate at the university, who understands the world of the play and the music of the language to further develop the play. Poor Boys’ Chorus is workshopped with Braden Abraham from Seattle Repertory Theatre before it is mounted for a full production comprised of a phenomenal team of actors and designers from the UT Department of Theatre and Dance. On opening night, November 7, 2014, the characters that have rattled in Brian’s brain for so many years finally come to life underneath a literal “Big Top,” constructed by Teena Sauvola, that transports the audience to an intimate, magical little world for an hour and a half.
In the summer of 2017, more than ten years after the play’s original inception, Annabel, Steeds, and the Poor Boys’ Chorus are headed to New York City as part of the Broadway Bound Theatre Festival’s inaugural season!
