Underground Obsession SpawnsComic One-Man Show At ETC

Brian McDonald has no trouble admitting to being a big fan of Barbra Streisand. 

“From when I first saw Funny Girl as a kid, I was just mesmerized,” he said. “I’ve just always found her incredible.” 

Which is part of what makes McDonald the perfect choice to star in Ensemble Theatre Company’s season-opening production of Buyer & Cellar, Jonathan Tolins’ one-man play about the fictionalized Alex, a wanna-be actor who couldn’t even keep a job at Disneyland but winds up running the real-life private shopping mall that Streisand built in the basement of her Malibu house – the play was inspired by Streisand’s 2010 coffee-table book My Passion for Design – complete with stores that stock her massive collection of dolls, costumes, and other keepsakes as well as a gift-wrapping station and frozen yogurt counter. 

Well that, and the fact that McDonald is the artistic associate and director of ETC, and the guy who received rave reviews for his first turn as Alex at Rubicon Theatre Company in 2018, back when McDonald ran the education program at RTC. 

“People have been asking if I’d ever do it again ever since, so when we were planning this season, it came up as an idea and I thought, maybe it’s time,” said McDonald, who hasn’t taken on a full theatrical role since RTC’s Buyer & Cellar closed eight years ago, instead honing his directing chops and working with kids. “I was a bit nervous about it, because it’s a monster of a one-person show, pretty intense and fast with lots of quick shirts and different characters, including Barbra, Alex’s boyfriend, and Streisand’s property manager. After I started working with the script again, I realized it’s still in me. So it’s very exciting to revisit the role.”

Buyer & Cellar sports an absurd and preposterous concept about being the only employee in a place that only one person ever visits, but Tolins turns it into a jumping off point to examine our relationship to celebrity culture, obsession with material objects, and the nature of friendship and connection. 

“Alex really wants to be a friend to her and for her to be a real friend to him, but he’s never really quite sure if that happens,” McDonald said. “There are moments where he thinks that they are and then there’s moments where he doubts that. That journey is really about the relationship that we have to celebrity and to those people that we idolize and our fascination with that world because it’s so far removed from reality.”

Critics have praised the piece as “a seriously funny and remarkably sustained slice of absurdist whimsy” noting that “even at its most irreverent the satire is tempered by affection and a hint of reluctant admiration.” 

McDonald agrees. “There’s a lot of poking fun at Barbra, but also done with a lot of heart and love,” he said. “It’s a wonderfully crafted script that in the middle of all this funny stuff, we get these little tender moments that are not saccharine or melodramatic.” 

That’s part of why the actor said he has no trouble at all relating to Alex, and even the staff at ETC are in alignment on that point.

“Everybody who’s read the script was saying, ‘Oh my God, this is Brian.’ Even the way that Alex speaks and talks about things. There’s a wonderful playfulness and youthfulness and childlike quality that I can really connect to because I still feel like I’m a big kid.”

McDonald said that the clever way that Buyer & Cellar explores our obsession with accumulating things is another driving force in the character’s journey to self-discovery.

“How we build our own little world in stuff we buy or how we decorate our house is really a reflection of who we are,” he said. “It’s an important part of our identity. Through this relationship with Streisand, Alex learns that what’s most important is the stuff that’s inside us.” 

On the other hand, there is one recent material acquisition that McDonald wouldn’t dream of giving up. 

“I came across a Barbra Streisand Barbie doll in the original box on eBay not long ago, and I had to buy it,” he said. “She’s sitting with me in my dressing room. I look at her every day and get inspired.”

Buyer & Cellar at ETC’s New Vic previews October 7-9, opens October 10 and runs through October 25. Visit www.etcsb.org