Actor Taylor Negron -
Spills the Beans About His Offbeat Travels
We all have stories about people we've met. They're great for parties and long car trips.
But few of us have Taylor Negron's kind of stories. Negron's show at Revolutions International Theatre Festival is all about the people he's met and the places his comedy has taken him, from the L.A. riots to the mean streets of New York, to comedy classes with Lucille Ball and dinner with recently assassinated Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto.
Negron has performed his show across the world at theater festivals, and it's been figured out pretty well, he said. But after recent events in Pakistan, he might add a new segment about Bhutto.
"I was thinking I was going to write about that. It's wild. I probably will write that," Negron said the day Bhutto was assassinated, for his upcoming play at the Revolutions Theatre Festival.
Look up his profile, and Negron has been on so many TV shows and films, your head would spin, from "ER" to "Friends," "Reno 911!" and more. He's a recognizable face through his comedy and his dramatic acting.
Through his career he's met some greats of the world. "I encounter people. Lucille Ball. I worked for her," Negron said. "Basically, what it is, I was assigned to be with her and she had a nervous breakdown in front of me. It sounds insane. It's very moving. You imagine one thing, and it's nothing like that."
His stories, though, aren't just about famous people. "One of the stories I talk about, I come home and find standing in the drapes was this man. He was a burglar. And he recognized me," Negron said. "I went hog wild on it. I said 'I'm going to tie you to the water heater ... If you cry, it's going to make things worse.' I did this entire play on him. I knew that if I didn't, there would be problems. He was in my house. I turned it into this huge play."
"He kept saying 'I didn't do it.' It was that unaccountability that made my crazy. He was sneering at me like I (messed) his day up," Negron said. That's one of the lighter stories in the show.
Two years ago, though, Negron was in Pakistan and had dinner with Bhutto at her home with his father while on a comedy tour.
"She was gentle, but an ordinary matronly Indian- English woman. She ate a lot, and she knew who I was. She was asking me all these questions about why her children like hip-hop music so much," Negron said. "I said that a lot of (hip-hop) I don't understand."
Review by Dan Mayfield of The Albuquerque Journal