He has co-produced with Tara Varney six plays at the Kansas City Fringe Festival. The first was “Jesus Christ, King of Comedy” in 2008, co-written with Tara Varney, Michelle Cotton, and Young Han C. Lester. The following year he co-produced with Tara Varney his one-act play “Lingerie Shop.”
In 2010, Bryan co-produced the best attended play of the 2010 Kansas City Fringe, “Khaaaaan! the Musical,” co-written with Tara Varney with music by Michelle Cotton and Tim Gillespie.
Following “Khaaaaan!” he co-produced two thematically-related one-act plays co-written with Tara Varney; “Hexing Hitler” and “Sexing Hitler.” In 2013 he co-produced Arch Oboler’s radio play “Chicken Heart.”
For the 2014 Kansas City Fringe Festival, Bryan is adapting Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” as a opera with music by Daniel Doss. All of his Kansas City Fringe Festival plays have been in the top-ten best-attended plays of their respective years.
Prior to the Kansas City Fringe Festival, Bryan was vice-president, treasurer, and sound designer for Gorilla Theatre Productions, where his play “The Feast” was produced in 1999 as a winner of their Inaugural Dramatists Festival. There he also directed Eugene O'Neill's "The Hairy Ape."
From 2000-2003 he was president of the Just Off Broadway Theatre Association, where he initiated the Kansas City Playwrights Festival.
In 2008 Bryan was also commissioned to write “The Maltese Murder,” a parody of Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon” for the Johnson County Public Library’s “Big Read.”
Bryan is a founding member of the Kansas City Screenwriters, where he has written six full-length features and two of his short films have been produced, “Rhubarb Pie” and “Fringe Follies.”
In 2012 Bryan and Tara Varney were asked to create an exhibit at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art call “The Hargrove Family Exhibition” which ran from December, 2012 to March, 2013.
As a graphic designer he has worked with KC Stage, KC Fringe, and KC FilmFest, where he is also a festival screener. During the day, Bryan is a graphic designer at the American Academy of Family Physicians.
Bryan received a B.A. in theatre with a minor in art at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He also studied art for one year at the Kansas City Art Institute.
You can find out more about the life of Bryan at www.jupiterkansas.com
