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By Denise M. Baran-Unland
SPECIAL TO THE HERALD NEWS
Dan Telfer, 21, formerly of Elwood, recalls the longing he felt throughout his junior high years to reach that magical eighth grade.
"Each year, the 8th grade always had a play," said Telfer, now 21 and living in Chicago (his father, William Telfer Jr., still lives in Elwood). "It was kind of interesting because, for some reason, everyone took it seriously ... even bullies who had no creative part of them. But my 8th grade class was so badly behaved that we didn't get to do it. We were the only class who skipped it in the whole history of the school."
There's plenty of consolation for Telfer now. His comedic one-act play, Love Oven, is a featured segment of a night of comedies that opened at the Playground Theater Wednesday and runs until Aug. 23. The entire slate of one-acts, produced by Telfer's own ToastGun Productions, is titled Ding! Four Stories of Automatic Response...
The other three comedies are Sure Thing & Words, Words, Words, written by David Ives and directed by Clayton Faircloth and Turned On, written by Joanie Schultz and directed by Chris Walsh, also the director of Love Oven. For the July 26th performance of Ding! Four Stories of Automatic Response... Turned On will be replaced with a comedic monologue performed by Telfer.
ToastGun? "I've always had this obsession with toast and toasters," said Telfer. "I find it hard to believe that people take so much time cooking bread the 'right way.' So I came up with this logo of a gun shooting out burnt bread." But seriously, folks. "It's (ToastGun Productions) given me an opportunity to work with people at my college and take their works out into the real world."
The real world for Telfer right now includes going to school at Chicago's Columbia College, taking an extra year after changing his major from fiction writing to acting. After graduating from Homewood-Flossmoor High School, Telfer had briefly considered moving to California, then promptly rejected that notion.
"It's scary out there," he said. "You have to get an agent right away and then you get to do three commercials over a 10-year period and you spend a lot of your time being a waiter." Though last summer, Telfer was featured in a national Coca-Cola commercial that was shot in Chicago ("Seeing that it was Coca Cola, I thought they would have carted me out someplace more fancy," he said), with the actors talking around tables and down stairs.
Since late in 1997, Telfer has been associated with Chicago's famous ImprovOlympic, after receiving an internship there. "I thought I was just going over there to clean up and make connections," Telfer said with a laugh. "Six months later, they put me on a team. It was a random luck kind of thing."
He received training from the late, legendary Del Close, a founder of ImprovOlympic and Second City. Close was a major influence of such notable performers as Bill Murray, John Belushi and Harold Ramis. "I feel lucky for this experience," said Telfer. "Mostly everyone else is out of college."
Over the years, Telfer has performed with teams at ImprovOlympic; his newest team is called Hufflepuff House. "That name will definitely change," said Telfer, who said that each of the new teams were named after each of dormitories at Harry Potter's school. "We were given the feminine one," he said.
Love Oven is about a family that "cannibalizes each other in a psychological way," according to Telfer... doing so in a way that the audience will find funny. It is based on a play Telfer wrote in high school and decided to enter in his school's annual literary contest. "It was really weird," he said. "I was the drama kid and all the literary kids were really mad... they had this incestual thing about others getting into their contests."
Currently, Telfer is working on two more plays ("Love Oven is really boosting my moral," he said) and promises that the next one will be serious. "Though even my serious efforts turn out to be somewhat funny," he added. Telfer said that the play is about a boy with telekinetic powers and the trouble he gets into with them. "But there's this other character, a businessman, and he has a lizard's head."
Goals? More of the same, except on a larger scale...and hoping not to work as a receptionist, which Telfer has done to "keep me alive." Telfer has been surprisingly happy to discover that he is able to take his "strangeness" and turn it into art, as well turning his loner self into a more social being.
"You learn a lot about real life in the theater," Telfer said. "Acting, interestingly enough, is about relationships. It's seeing two people interact and create a different world onstage. It helps you to agree with people and to learn to let things go. It's (acting) kicking me in the butt and making me a better person."At a glance .What: Ding, Four Stories of Automatic Response... (including Dan Telfer's Love Oven. When: Wednesdays through August 23 at 8 p.m. Where: The Playground Theater, 3341 N. Lincoln Ave., Chicago. Reservations/information: (773) 377-5006 Ext. 1167 or visit Telfer's ToastGun Productions website at www.oocities.org.toastgun.
07/23/00