Laughing with life: Richard Arias Jr. hopes his plays make people think

By Kristine Thomas

Richard Arias, Jr.’s friends, family and co-workers know to watch what they say around him.

“They know what they say might end up in one of my plays,” Arias said with a hearty laugh.

An office worker for the state of Oregon’s Housing and Community Services department, Arias carries a notebook wherever he goes to write down the “little one liners” he hears for his plays. To date, he’s written four plays, including the most recent Mr. Giggle Bear with performances Nov. 5, 6 and 7 with the Brush Creek Players.

The idea for Mr. Giggle Bear appeared at a cast party when he and his friends were discussing their favorite Saturday morning cartoons. The plays deals with what he images happens behind the scenes.

Long before he learned how to talk, he learned to sing. And words are like music for him. The wrong line delivered by an actor is like hearing a flat note and the right words bring him joy.

“I think I was the only kindergartener growing up with a stereo. I didn’t want toys for Christmas instead I wanted records,” he said.  “My plays are like sheet music. There are high and low points, breaks and drama.”

As a student at Lindhurst High School in California, Arias was an actor. He performed in plays including Our Town and Romeo and Juliet.

Arias, 37, knew he could act but didn’t think he could write.

“I was told I was funny and that I should write a play,” he said, adding his friend and playwright Sonya Heard encouraged and coached him with his first play Horsin’ Around, written for the 100th anniversary Davenport’s Arabian Quest at Homer Davenport Days.

The response he received from the audience and friends inspired him to write Gathering Nuts, a story about the chaos at a Thanksgiving dinner.

“The play is loosely based on my own family’s experiences,” he said.

Goosebumps cover his arms as he recalls the memory of hearing the words he’s written delivered back to him.

“My feelings of fear disappeared to feelings of accomplishment, pride and happiness,” he said. “I knew this is what I wanted to do.”

Carlotta Alvarez, a character in Gathering Nuts says, “If you can’t live life as your true self, then you’re not really living are you?”

Arias said the quote is something he lives by each day.

The second play in the Gathering Nuts trilogy is Gathering Nuts: Crazy Stop By dealing with drug abuse, single mothers, motherhood and widows.

“There is a lot of bad that surrounds us and I think we have to be able to laugh about it,” he said. “I try to put a comedic twist on what’s happening in life because I think people will be more receptive to it. Laughter through tears is the best medicine.”

In June, he wrote his first drama called Over the Broken Rainbow, an ode to Judy Garland. The play deals with a young man whose mother dies and he ends up in a sanitarium. It was the first time he played the lead in one of his plays.

“I decided to try this because I had  been typecast as the funny guy,” he said.

Not an actor to cry “stage tears,” Arias said he has to cry real tears in Over the Broken Rainbow. He knew he was performing convincingly when he heard the audience sniffle back tears.

“The play deals with the fine line between passion and obsession,” he said. “Who are we to decide which line someone stands in?”

Arias doesn’t receive any compensation for his plays or his acting, just the appreciation of patrons of Brush Creek Theater.

For each play he writes or directs, he watches behind the curtains like a “nervous dad watching his child at her first piano recital. When I hear that first burst of laughter, then I can breathe, sit back and watch the rest of the play.”

Writing from an actor’s point of view, Arias said he hears the words in his head and even acts out scenes.
Even with his fourth play completed, he still finds writing plays “nerve wrecking. It’s not easy at all. If it ever got easy, then it’s time to quit because I believe it I am not terrified, I don’t belong here.”

As the cast for Mr. Giggle Bear quietly climbed the stairs for a rehearsal on a warm October evening, Arias confides he has so many stories to tell, the good and the bad with a comedic twist.

“I enjoy putting stories in front of people and making them laugh and think while experiencing an array of emotions,” he said.