Dillon, Disney, and Deranged Characters Tell ‘The Story of War’

Dillon Yuhasz played the fairly deranged title character in Young Frankenstein last year at SBCC Theatre Group. He was perhaps the sanest of the bunch in the over-the-top comic take on the famous monster movie. 

But as out there as that might have been, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. 

Yuhasz’s current show, The Story of War, may sound staid, but the one-man show he created and wrote is anything but. Yuhasz portrays 17 different characters in the show, which gets an encore weekend run August 14-16 at the Community Arts Workshop following its premiere last March. What’s so weird about that? Well, almost all of them are Disney-esque animatronic robots, save for their creator, Wathel Rogers – the inventor of animatronics – who has separated from Disney in order to create “the greatest animatronic show of all time.” The concept of the absurdist comedy is that the characters sequentially share the long history of war, the violent pursuit of power from cave man days to modern times. But it’s all meant to be fun and entertaining. 

Got that? 

Well, Yuhasz hasn’t completely wrapped his head around how to explain it to others yet himself. But let’s back up a moment. 

The Santa Barbara native, who majored in a new area of ‘Theater and Community’ at UCSB, actually honed his on-stage skills performing with the student troupe Improvability, and later appeared in several community theater productions including Circle Bar B Dinner Theatre and Out of the Box prior to the SBCC gig. 

But after a lull in work handily offered Yuhasz breathing space while “waiting around for someone to come up with something that I wanted to do,” he decided to take matters into his own hand. 

“I suddenly realized that I should just put on something that I would want to see,” he recalled. “It was a huge wake-up call.”

Yuhasz created a pair of one-man shows to perform in his backyard, the first called Faces of Magic that required him to, well, learn how to do magic. All My Actors Are Dead was the follow-up. 

“It was an accomplished actor who was putting on a career retrospective, but all of the people who were supposed to be doing the scenes with him died on the way to the theater, so I had to use audience members to come in and play those parts and draw on my improv experience.” Yuhasz explained. 

“I like the challenge,” he said. “And I wanted to really challenge myself for this next show because a typical one-man show is really just a monologue, which can be dull.” 

A trip to Disney’s EPCOT Center in Florida was just the thing to inspire The Story of War. 

“They had a show called The Spirit of America, which was a very patriotic show about the founding of America, all told through animatronics. That’s when I got the idea of me being an animatronic (robot) for the entire show. When the idea started to morph into something, I drew on the fact that I have loved history since watching The History Channel as a kid and even taught history for a couple years. It was perfect, because I didn’t even have to do any research.” 

The characters in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney were also part of the inspiration, despite the hokeyness and almost eerie feeling they can evoke. Or maybe because of it.

“There is a serious charm to those old animatronics,” he said. “They were technology innovative at the time, but with AI of course, they’re very basic. But I think people are starting to crave things like that, and it’s not just nostalgia. Animatronics are a real tangible thing that’s got movement. It’s trying to be a person but of course it’s clearly not, but we still want to believe that they are. Which means [in the show] I’m a human playing machines who are trying to be human.” 

To that end, Yuhasz and his two helpers – his wife Brittany Ragan and neighbor Rebekah Hofberg – are employing shifting, frequent costume changes with other elements, everything handmade with vintage styling. 

“The goal with the show is for it to feel like you are on a ride at a theme park, sitting in one of these janky little cars going around and experiencing all the scenes and animatronics,” he said. “We are poking fun, but we are also trying to be as real as possible and pay homage. 

Yuhasz also portrays Wathel Rogers, the early Disney imagineer. Rogers operates as a carnival barker trying to sell the audience on his vision and his show because he wasn’t getting enough credit at Disney; which brings extra stakes beyond loosely tracing war over many thousands of years. 

“He was the engineer genius behind the scenes, top-notch in the field and coming up with this crazy technology,” Yuhasz says.

Drawing on his improv experience, Yuhasz also breaks the fourth wall in War, calling on the audience for suggestions or even stepping into a character, making the show a different experience every performance and upping the engagement. 

“To just do the script straight through every night isn’t challenging enough,” he said. “I need more of a risk factor, because you never know what’s going to happen.”

Yuhasz has also partnered with Characters Unlimited and Zoltar from the movie BIG who will be giving out fortunes and sharing his wisdom after being fed a dollar bill before the show. The pre-show party in the CAW courtyard also features a carnival popcorn cart, a concession booth selling snacks and desserts, plus other animatronic-inspired surprises. 

In branching out into a more public venue than his backyard, Yuhasz had to come up with a new name for his company, settling on Not Half Bad Theatre Co. This is not surprising given his sense of humor. 

“We also just added a tagline: ‘We take stupid theater very seriously.’” 

A bit like, dare we say, Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. 

Visit www.nothalfbad.org