Seattle Gay News
Issue 26, Volume 41, June 28, 2013
PRIDE ARTS SPECIAL
by Miryam Gordon SGN A&E Writer Ian Bell is an actor, a director, and a prolific producer of some of Seattle’s best-loved evenings: Seattle Confidential and Ian Bell’s Brown Derby (www. brownderbyseries.org). A native of Vancouver, Washington, he came to Seattle around 1994. Ian recalls finding a hotbed of theater. “It was crazy,” he said. “In the next year, I met so many cool people and got so many cool opportunities to work, in something like five or seven different plays. I did all sorts of things, including late-nights with The Empty Space Theatre [Chicks with Dicks, Part 2].” Ian thought of himself mostly in terms of “serious” stage plays at that point, though. “I did Killer Joe at The Empty Space Theater – I played Ansel. I thought the serious stuff was the way I was going. Carlson in Of Mice and Men at The Empty Space was my Equity-joining role.” 1995: A SHIFT IN FOCUS Ian’s life was about to shift dramatically (pardon the pun). “Star Drek: The Musical, at AHA Theatre, had been running for about a year, and they auditioned fill-in cast members. In high school, I had entertained my peers with my five-minute Star Trek. I did my
five-minute episode as my audition, where I played three or four different members of [the cast]. I ended up getting cast as Scotty, and then Kirk for a year, and went on over 100 times. That’s when I met most of the people who ended up creating Bald Faced Lie with me.” The sketch comedy and theater company Bald Faced Lie existed from about
1996 to 2006. “It was a late-night sketchcomedy scripted performance. It was three guys and three gals and we wrote a 45-minute show of sketches and did musical numbers. “For the next 10 years, we all were doing all sides [of theatrical production]: writing, directing, producing, performing. We each had to learn how to do set design, costume design, lighting. It was an immersion into how to do everything.” HE’S NOT HEATHER Ian’s father is a neurologist and his mom is a pianist. He has two older brothers and says, “I always wanted a sister. My mother said I would have been named Heather if I were a girl. I am so glad I’m not Heather Bell, in a Little Bo Peep dress. I wonder if I would have been a ‘Heather’ like one in the movie. Thank God we’ll never find out. “My parents took me to Ashland, Oregon [home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival]. The first show, [Shakespeare’s] A Comedy of Errors, blew my mind. I aspired to be able to do that – it was the gold standard. I even ended up working with a few
people I saw on stage in Seattle, later in my life! “I wrote my first play in third grade and performed it for my class – about Thanksgiving. In fifth and sixth grade, we had a crew who would see something and say to each other, ‘We can do that.’ So we saw Cabaret and decided to do the opening number. We painted ladders and blew up balloons and totally Fosse’d it up. We performed it for an all-school assembly! “My parents drove me to Goodwill stores so I could find costumes for various plays. Even for my third-grade Thanksgiving play, I had to find something pilgrim-y. I loved it [the pilgrim costume] so much, I’d wear it to school for the day. My older brothers were so sweet and patient when their friends said, ‘Hey, your brother is running around like a pilgrim.’ “I formed a mime troupe after we saw a Marcel Marceau performance and we caught mime fever – a silent killer. (Ba dum bum.) We watched Marceau routines and recreated them. “In high school, there was a great teacher who didn’t dumb down the theatrical presentations [for youth]. We did stuff like [Sam] Shepard’s Unseen Hand, and Dark of the Moon – things that were being done at ACT Theatre at the same time. It felt cutting-edge. “We had a black-box theater at school and we’d have Friday-night coffeehouse once a month. Serious monologues, humorous sketches, poetry reading, music.” see ian bell page 22
donna day photography