Fried Funeral a return for playwright Osborne

Dewey Frye is dead. Leaving the rest of his family to pick up the pieces -- if they don't kill each other first.

That's the starting-off plot point of Southern Fried Funeral, onstage today-June 3 at Little Rock's Murry's Dinner Playhouse. (Heavy rains and the swelling of a pair of backyard creeks April 29-30 flooded the theater and delayed the opening for two weeks.)

The comedy is by Nashville, Tenn., playwrights Nate Eppler and J. Dietz Osborne, a Little Rock native with plenty of Murry's experience -- he has performed on its roll-out stage, and his mother worked in the office for many years.

Don't worry about a coffin or the wailing of mourners, Eppler says. "The real action at a funeral is in the kitchen. Anywhere where there's a table and food where people are getting together, that's where the real story is.

"It's outrageous -- exactly what you'd expect out of a play called Southern Fried Funeral."

Produced in 2010, it was the first full-length collaboration between Eppler and Osborne, who had previously written a handful of one-acts for youngsters. (The first of those, Osborne recalls, was called FishaFrogaPotaTurnip.)

The two were working together at Nashville's Chaffin's Barn Dinner Theatre, Eppler as an actor and Osborne as director of audience development, "and there was an opportunity to write a play for young audiences; they needed some scripts," Eppler says. "So we started working together and almost immediately started talking about writing something full-length."

Meanwhile, Osborne adds, "For several years I had been directing at a church in Franklin, Tenn., and it was becoming harder and harder to pick scripts that fit the profile they needed, as far as men and women go, and what the size of the cast was, and if it was an appropriate show for those audiences. And I went to Nate and said, 'It seems like something we could do.'

"We got together and started shooting ideas around. When we wrote the contract, the title Southern Fried Funeral was a placeholder; we couldn't think of anything else right then."

"We were waiting for a better title," Eppler adds with a laugh, "and we found that the companies we were talking to were really excited by a play that said exactly what it was on the box.

"The thing we're promising is, it's a new play, but it's a really lived-in experience. People will see characters they'll recognize."

Osborne grew up doing musicals with the Community Theatre of Little Rock, including productions of Gypsy when he was 9 and Damn Yankees when he was 17. He graduated from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock with a theater degree and moved to Nashville in 2000, working as an actor, director, playwright and choreographer.

His last Little Rock stage appearance was at Murry's, in a somewhat ill-fated production of the musical Singin' in the Rain in July 2007. (Many of the cast members were very unhappy throughout the rehearsal process and the run, plus there was that dress-rehearsal disaster that tore out the back of the set, the back of the stage and the ceiling rain-making system. "At the end of the run I got everybody T-shirts that said, 'I survived Singin' in the Rain at Murry's Dinner Playhouse," Osborne recalls.)

He made his last stage appearance in a Nashville-area production of August Osage County in the fall of 2015. "I'm pretty much retired now," he says. "I raise money for a small nonprofit here in Nashville [Miriam's Promise, a child-placement agency] and I just don't have the time."

The church that first produced Southern Fried Funeral in March 2010 asked them for a sequel, so Eppler and Osborne wrote Southern Fried Nuptials. A third Frye family comedy is in the works, called Southern Fried Christmas.

However, it's not likely, Eppler says, that it'll become a franchise with seemingly innumerable sequels, like Nunsense or Greater Tuna. "A trilogy," Osborne insists, darkly hinting that the Frye family might meet some horrid fate at the final Christmas-show curtain.

Eppler says, "I love writing plays with Dietz. Getting together and writing these plays is awesome. It's also awesome that we got that sort of support -- every company that has done Southern Fried Funeral has turned around and asked us to do Southern Fried Nuptials.

"It's truly unexpected that we'd be having this conversation seven years later. That's a long life cycle for any play."

Style on 05/16/2017