If you didn’t get to see it live, now you can be Virtually Lobotomized…

One of the presentations to Universal by the team creating Universal Studios Japan ended up being a creative one. The assignment to all areas of the Universal Creative Department was to create an informative presentation introducing the designers, ride architects, and each area of the park.

I pitched my boss the idea of letting me write, direct and shoot a funny corporate short film in the Universal back lot for Area 3′s presentation?… He said yes.

I had total access, a bunch of willing and not so willing actors, and the entire back lot at my disposal! Like that wasn’t great enough: Then they gave me costumes!

It was an embarrassment of riches when you consider that every one of these people was a delight. (The Osaka footage in Part 5 was shot by one of our team members’ wife, Lorna Collins in Osaka, Japan, by the way.)

Completely contrary to his “evil” character here, my boss, Michael Harrington was a great boss who gave me the opportunity to play around with a camera, dress up non-actors in costumes, and roam around Universal Studios Hollywood back lot shooting wherever I pleased.

Christiane Sentianin was my producer… Heaven.

The short was quite a hit within the company, and finally, through means we couldn’t have dreamed of then ~ I get to share it! … It is separated into 5 parts on YouTube… Enjoy!

From THIS WAY TO YOUR RITUAL LOBOTOMY, posted by Felix Pire on 7/22/2010 (136 items)

http://latalkradio.com/images/Tony-071610.mp3

I sound all revved up, ’cause the interview was at 6:30pm and I was about to go on that night at 8pm.

By 6:30, I’m already psyched up, plus I still had to look at costumes and do my own pre-ritual ritual.

I thought they were really kind, and the interview went well!

L.A. Ovation & New York Outer Critic’s Circle-winning actor Felix Pire returns to L.A. stage with This Way To Your Ritual Lobotomy, a multi-character one-man comedy.

Guillermo Reyes, Playwright • Paul Storiale, Director • Emrhys Cooper, Producer

Hollywood, California: Reprising their award-winning combination, actor Felix Pire has signed on to portray more than a dozen characters in a new solo play written by Guillermo Reyes, who penned their first collaboration, Men on the Verge of a His-Panic Breakdown.

They are joined by award winning director, Paul Storiale (The Columbine Project) at the Avery Schreiber Theatre in the NoHo Arts District of Los Angeles.

After the success of Men on the Verge… Off-Broadway at the 47th Street Theatre, formerly the Puerto Rican Traveling Company, Pire e-mailed Reyes. “I said, if I’m Lily Tomlin, you’re my Jane Wagner, get to work! … I began to e-mail him and perform characters over the phone, which populated the world of a new play. I also made mention – and Elian Gonzalez was big in the news then – that maybe I could play Elian Gonzalez all grown up. This set Guillermo going.”

The surfacing of the play was not immediate. In the interim, Pire wrote his second solo play under fellowship at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, called The Origins of Happiness in Latin, and it won the 2000 California Community Foundation Brody Arts Grant. Not long thereafter, the Arizona Theatre Company awarded Origins their National Latino Playwriting Award in 2001, and produced it in 2003. The reviews led Pire Off-Broadway to Urban Stages, where the play was produced. Recently, for both his solo plays, the Off-Broadway theatre awarded him their 2009 Plaque for “Artistic Brilliance”.

Now, Pire is eager to return to the Los Angeles stage. “I haven’t performed in Los Angeles since Men on the Verge… in 1995. I’m excited to unleash this ritual upon the audience nightly,” says Pire with mad gleam in his eye. He adds: “Anyone who dares show up and take part in the ‘frontal lobotomy’ is going to walk away from it having laughed their ass off. All of these characters are so wacky, strange and fun in a sick way. A futuristic priest who tells you why he’s going to lobotomize the audience at the end of the ritual; an old Texas lady who teaches Erectile Dysfunction workshops? A terrorist writing love e-mails to Lady Gaga? It’s absolutely preposterous, and yet the characters are so unique, that everyone empathizes with them!”

Set in a distant future and sometimes in our present, the play is a cavalcade of varying characters where Pire puts on display his talents as a mimic and an actor who can convincingly steer through electric characters without losing sight of their humanity.

Anita Gates in her Men on the Verge… New York Times review, wrote about Pire: “ Felix Pire doesn’t have a false moment in this glorious six-character, eight sketch, one man play by Guillermo Reyes, even while changing costumes. Just as the audience is filing him under ‘talented but maybe limited to playing hunks’, Mr. Pire shoves a cigar in his mouth and breaks your heart as a 60-ish owner of Paco’s Cuban restaurant in Phoenix.” The L.A. Times referred to his energy as a performer as that of a “human buzz-saw”.

Pire’s time twisting collaboration with Reyes moved into warp speed in 2007, when he performed a small workshop of the play at the Diavolo Dance Theatre space in downtown Los Angeles. He performed another workshop at Urban Stages in 2009.

“Los Angeles has a very lively tickle bone. In New York, people like to laugh and think. In Hollywood, people just like to laugh… and as an actor, I like to morph through characters speaking in organic poems, and through that, hitch the mind… Satire…” Pire, a veteran of the army of the Twelve Monkeys, directed by the sci-fi and fantasy master, Terry Gilliam, intuits that his next role might be in another science-fiction playing an alien, if this play is any indication.

While Reyes has been ensconced in a professor position at the Arizona State University, Pire has continued to play character roles in film and television. He has been seen in the films: Dear God, It’s My Party, and most recently his turn opposite Oscar winner, Mo’Nique, in the film Phat Girlz. On Television, Pire has been seen on NYPD BLUE (ABC), Prison Break (FOX), The Rerun Show (NBC) and as a series regular on Matt Waters (CBS).

“This Way To Your Ritual Lobotomy is a ritual performance wherein a futuristic semi-cyber holy man shows you examples of humans from the past to put on display how horrible they were, how evil and mean, to convince the audience to have their ‘ritual lobotomy’ at the end of the play, when their frontal lobes will be removed and replaced with ‘appetite enhancement chips’ sponsored by Starbucks, Wendy’s and Taco Bell,” explains playwright, Guillermo Reyes.

“Felix is adept at transforming from one character to another and I was working on a few… But mid-way through the process he told me he wanted to incorporate e-mails from me into the play and although I thought that was strange, I’d seen Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife, so I knew that convention can be done successfully. As it turns out, the character of ‘Guillermo Reyes’ in the play is the most real and the one you see most often. The audience bonds with him, and that’s where we really see Felix at his simplest. As a regular guy; well, a version of me… This play is funny, yes, but it’s also tender while balancing being a dark comedy about technology, so it has many levels,” added Reyes. He includes passages from the play’s monologues in his newly published book: Madre and I: A Memoir of Our Immigrant Lives.

Pire’s facility for character comes not only from the wide range of roles he’s played onscreen and is reinforced by the fact that he’s moonlighted as professor of acting in film at UCLA in 2008-09, and has taught solo performance at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Hollywood for the past seven years; teaching others acting, he insists, helps him develop as an actor and helps keep him in touch with young audiences.

“I have seven years worth of students in the Los Angeles area, who have yet to see me perform a solo play. I feel like I owe them a chance to see their professor in a late-night comedy ritual playing totally whacked-out SNL-type characters. I mean, for one I’m in full drag giving out paper penises, and in another passing out small cups of ‘poisoned’ Kool Aid as a crazy killer cultist… Listen, I know college kids, and to them, that’s a good time… I personally get a kick out of checking out who actually drinks the Kool Aid. I think I’ll enjoy poisoning my ex-students and the audience nightly,” quipped Pire.