Artistic Director
Asian Story Theater
1250 Weaver Street
San Diego, CA 92114
Phone: 619-527-2816
E-mail: ast@znet.com
(also known to play guitar as K.Lee)
In 1979, Mr. Brisby was a co-founder and the Artistic Director for the spiritual ancestor of Asian Story Theater, the Pacific Asian Actors' Ensemble (PAAE). Directing for that company while in residence at the Marquis Gallery Theater, he worked with playwright Wakako Yamauchi on a production of her award-winning play And the Soul Shall Dance, and with David Henry Hwang on a production of his play F.O.B.
He has directed productions for San Diego's Old Globe Theatre, the San Diego Zoo, and the Bowery Theatre, among others.
Together with his wife Gingerlily Lowe, and Suanne Pauley, he produces the Asian Story Theater, bringing multicultural theater experiences to thousands of young audience members every year.
When the family moved back to the states, he attended high school in Poway, then Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. He started writing and directing there, and after graduating with degrees in English and Music, bicycled down the coast with a vague plan of reuniting with some friends to produce a radio theater company. (One script was produced at KSDT, and a bit later he co-founded AirStage to produce a radio play called Where No Shadows Fall. This was written by J. Michael Straczynski and produced at KPBS, and submitted by AirStage and KPBS for an NEA grant application. It was never funded, for several good reasons.)
Unwilling to wait for radio theater to make a national comeback, he assembled a small group of ex-high school friends and produced a play: Faustus, at the Second Avenue Theatre. This was an original adaptation by Kent and Greg Welch. They hacked up the versions written by Marlowe and Goethe, and got some excellent reviews. Greg used it as an audition piece that got him into Juilliard. Kent was hired as the Assistant Director of the CETA-financed San Diego Street Theater, then as a performer at the Marquis Theater. When the theater's owner Raoul Marquis decided to convert a small art gallery he owned into a second stage, Kent joined CAC-artist-in-residence Rafael Melendez and a writer/director named Judith Fein in a troika to manage the space.
This period, late-70's-to-early-80's, was a minor renaissance of theater in San Diego. The San Diego Rep was getting going, the Globe was going professional with Jack O'Brien, and the La Jolla Playhouse reappeared. At the Marquis Gallery Theater, we had a Chicano Theater component producing plays, regular series of New Playwrights classes and productions, puppet theater, improv theater (I ran the house the night Whoopi Goldberg and Don Victor taped their audition for Saturday Night Live), radio Theater (AirStage was born here), and a Theater for the Deaf project started here, although the first and maybe only show they produced was done at the Second Avenue Theatre (directed by, I think, Pat Launer??). I worked with a couple of other on-staff performers there, Ricardo Pitts-Wiley and Larry Czoka, to write a musical called Celebrations, An African Odyssey. This show has been produced somewhere every year since it's premiere in 1979, and tours on the east coast every Christmas. And here is where and when the Pacific Asian Actors' Ensemble began.
PAAE was comprised mostly of Asian-American performers who were sick to death of playing extras in Starlight's semi-annual Flower Drum Song productions, then generally disappearing. We premiered with an original script by Thomas Sesma, then moved on to the Yamauchi and Hwang scripts. However, there was a chasm between what was attracting attention in Los Angeles and New York (Yamauchi and Hwang), and what Asian Americans in the San Diego community at large were interested in seeing. One night their well-reviewed and generally excellent cast of F.O.B. outnumbered the audience, and they knew they had a serious community relations problem. There are only three people in the cast of F.O.B.
Approaching the mid-80's, government arts subsidies through the CETA program began to expire. Theaters that existed primarily (or only) through the skills of grantwriters disappeared. The nucleus of artists still working together as PAAE decided to focus on producing a theater that might actually be capable of paying for itself through ticket sales. The Magic Machine Children's Repertory Theatre was born.
For the next few years, they produced theater for family audiences. Most shows were adapted from folk stories, and others were wholly original. They presented four shows most weekends, at the Old Town Opera House, the Marquis Theater, or sometimes in Balboa Park. ("I don't think I ever worked so hard in my life.") During this time they experimented with different performance styles, with music, movement, audience interaction and participation, and a variety of production and storytelling techniques.
But this was a tremendous amount of work. When their shows earned them an offer to produce a show for the San Diego Zoo, for what seemed at the time to be a heck of a lot of money, they did their best to sell out. And what a credit: "I played a turtle one summer in the San Diego Zoo!" 32 times per week. At the end of the summer, Ginger and Kent were married.
Their work as the Magic Machine also attracted the attention of a Philadelphia-based company called Theater Arts for Youth. This group had been sending off up to eight different touring productions of Babes in Toyland every Christmas, and four companies doing Wizard of Oz every spring, for over 20 years. They were interested in finding a director on the west coast who could assemble productions to reach eastward with their products, and contracted Kent.
It was interesting for a while, but the company's absolutely conservative business mentality eventually caused Brisby to lose interest. When he and his wife volunteered to help coordinate entertainment for the San Diego Chinese Center's annual Chinese New Year Food and Cultural Faire, they were surprised to find themselves in touch with a wide cross section of the Asian American community. It gave them the idea to incorporate parts of their work with PAAE and the Magic Machine into broad-based community interests and performing skills. Through the San Diego Chinese Center, they applied to the Commission for Arts and Culture for funds to help realize a new "Story Theater" project. The Commission's approval allowed them to begin.
One constant is that Kent has always acted, appearing in more than 100 full productions. His writing and directing grew out of his own background as a performer. As a first grader in Omaha, he was awarded an art scholarship at the prestigious Jocelyn Memorial Institute. To fill out the morning, he had to pick a second class. He chose Drama. Before long he was skipping the art class entirely, and taking a double-dose of drama classes. His first non-school play was the immortal classic of bravery overcoming ignorance: Jack in the Beanstalk. He played Jack.
In Micronesia, the theater opportunities were a little less formal; something around Christmas was about it. One year he produced a very Ibsen-esque drama explaining Santa's motivations. Another year he was the only bearded 10-year-old in the Christmas pageant.
When he first arrived in San Diego, Kent began reviewing local theater productions. It was a cheap way to get familiar with the local companies and performers. Up until that time, he had been IN more shows than he had seen. That quickly changed, reviewing two hundred productions over the next year or so. Kent continued to choose roles carefully: the Rep's CHRISTMAS CAROL one year, cast by Alan Schneider as Pozzo in a production of WAITING FOR GODOT for the Southern California Black Repertory Theater, a few others. Emergency understudy performances in his own and friends' shows, but that's about it. "I'm sort of a gentleman actor nowadays. I act when I choose, and when I have some special interest in a project. The truth is that it is not easy to find actors with as much experience as I have. And when I do, I can rarely afford them." As his activities have broadened, he finds he has less and less time for actually taking a role in a production. "Special occasions only, now. I did PASTORELA this last Christmas, so I could do a show with my wife and daughter. I'm taking a small part in FA MU LAN for the same reason. That's two shows in 4 months, after no real role in maybe 10 years before that. Maybe it's a trend."