This article is from the January 2012 issue of KC Stage
The U-Haul was packed. On the night of July 29, Kansas City couple Zac Eubank and Becca Scott had all of the worldly possessions they couldn’t sell secured safely in a Uhaul trailer with their car gassed and ready to drive. Then they got the call. Becca’s Fringe show, Heaven So Far, had drawn the most audience in their venue and she would be needed to perform the next day in the Fringe Hangover. Their much anticipated move to Los Angeles would have to wait one more day.
Arriving in LA, they found a great apartment and went about the business of starting over. In KC, Zac Eubank was a highly regarded designer and artist, head of the Aren’t We Clever design Studio, much in demand for video production and graphic design. Becca Scott was a recent graduate of UMKC’s theater department and a popular actress, known for her performances in Beirut at the Living Room and in PreMortem at the Fishtank, among many others. She and Zac had met in the Spring and collaborated as artists on a video production of Samuel Becket’s play "Not I" for the show Bastards and Ash also performed at the Living Room.
Becca had planned on New York after graduation, but she and Zac took their dreams to LA. Looking for an idea, one day Becca blurted out, "I wanna play a bad clown." Together Zac and Becca hit the ground running, pulling together a production team introduced to them by the late Jameson Piedimonte, also a former resident of Kansas City. And together, they started creating Funny Days.
Funny Days is a video series, written by Zac and Becca. Zac is the director and Becca stars as the clown, Bee.
Funny Days takes place in an alternate reality where clowns must sneak into the country by way of illegal border crossings. Clowns are reviled as aliens, hated by the Magicians who run things and the normals who would love to see them deported back to their native land of Commedia.
Bee is a recent immigrant whose parents were killed crossing the border and the series follows her adventures as she tries to gain her "clown card" so she can perform legally. As the series develops, she may be "the one clown to rule them all", the person who may be the one responsible for clowns continued place in US society.
The pilot episode for Funny Days has been shot and will be available online in early January. The site is up and running and also contains the clever teaser trailers for the series: in the first, a whistling janitor reveals a secret, in the second, a put upon mime deals with office pressures, the third shows a full-on clown border crossing. These teases show a remarkable visual sense and lots of humor.
Besides themselves, Zac and Becca have put together a crew utilizing some top talents from the Kansas City area. The main supporting part of Cleo is played by recent UMKC acting graduate Amy Urbina. Anna Safar, a 2010 UMKC graduate, is featured in the third trailer and appears in numerous guises throughout the series.
The series sound is produced by local musician/sound engineer Alex Neidt and graphic design for the series were done by local KC artist Joel Ferguson.
The Funny Days pilot will be available on streaming video beginning in early January at www.funnydaysseries.com. Subsequent episodes will also be broadcast there. If you are interested in donating to the series, you can do so on the website.
Pete Bakely is a Kansas City area actor and playwright.
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